Gossip really bothers me on a visceral level, but I have to acknowledge its utility. Before news organs with something to lose will touch a story, whispers carry the day. And most of it’s petty and garbage and untrue, but occasionally it can be an insurgency. Sometimes gossip, the original viral information, is the fastest route to justice.

In 1973, gossipmonger Rona Barrett and Sir Clement Freud, the polymath grandson of Sigmund Freud, got into a dust-up on a program Jack Paar hosted years after he abandoned the Tonight Show.

From Freud’s 2009 obituary in the Telegraph: “In England the bearded Freud, who bore an uncanny resemblance to King Edward VII, became a household name appearing in dog food commercials alongside an equally mournful bloodhound named Henry.

His journalistic output was prodigious, running the gamut from the New Yorker to the pre-Murdoch Sun. He was at his best writing on food and drink (he had been an apprentice at the Dorchester and trained at the Martinez in Cannes). He wrote about recalcitrant head waiters, overrated chefs and curmudgeonly customs officers, waging a ceaseless battle against their arrogance, even though not always free of the trait himself.

Once, having waited 25 minutes for turtle soup, he told the waitress: ‘If you are making fresh turtle soup it is going to take two days, and we do not have the time. If it is canned turtle soup, I do not wish to eat here if it takes you 25 minutes to open a can.’”