Gossip is an entertaining sideshow as long as it stays out of earshot of those ears it's indirectly targeting - for reaching them ends the exchange and as an overstated trail of tears. Most of the gossip I overheard in my young life was between hens complaining about their husbands, bemoaning shameful delinquency or extramarital trysts of some younger relative, a peer that has become the object of envy or disgust or admiration, or simply complaints about getting old. Some of the most long-lasting inside jokes in my immediate family are quotes of these shell-shocked emigre oldsters and their colorful descriptions of very mundane events. Taken as a sociological concept, I've read that gossip does have the important function of binding peers in a community, thus reinforcing the status quo of previous generations through the social pressures of shame, guilt, and modeling opinions and behavior of older adults. A social outlet, in the same spirit of oral storytelling, people dramatize their fears, unload their grievances, and bond sympathetically in shared or invented feeling as peers. Worded another way, gossip is self-indulgence with a twist: comorbid with self-pity, with a dash of emotional sharing. So, while gossiping among peers can serve an essential role of binding peers and reinforcing mores i.e. weary, gossiping husbands sharing drinks taken to extreme, isolates and disciplines others through indirect attack. Personally, I have done my fair share of hand-wringing and exasperated sharing with friends or family members about younger siblings or cousins (or about myself, even), but generally avoid it and don't find it overly helpful resolving anything compared to direct conflict (resolution) or face-to-face intervention.