Proud as he was, he was servile enough to supply Alexander Pope with petty gossip about the authors attacked in Pope's The Dunciad.

Holy Father, the people of God are with you and will not let themselves be influenced by the petty gossip of the moment, by the trials that sometimes assail the community of believers.

The Narrator daydreams of Mme de Stermaria, but she abruptly cancels, although Saint-Loup rescues him from despair by taking him to dine with his aristocratic friends, who engage in petty gossip.

And then, too, they brought her quite a whiff of Parisian air, and talking all together with bursts of laughter and exclamation and emphatic little gestures, they gave her all the petty gossip of the week just past.

I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organised masses.

Now he would have to listen to her complaints and her petty gossip when he wanted to read, or just as bad, be disturbed by the slobbering stereovision serials she favored.

Back in Rome, on Palm Sunday, the Pope himself spoke darkly of "the petty gossip of dominant opinion."

In the prologue, Jackson says: "I didn't want this book to be about the small petty gossip that makes up a lot of the NBA world.

He felt that it was impossible to ask Robert Williamson and probably have the girl's name overflowed in a stream of petty gossip concerning her and all her antecedents and collaterals to the third and fourth generation.

There was nothing to talk about except the petty gossip of the road, the good and bad spikes, the charitable and uncharitable counties, the iniquities of the police and the Salvation Army.