Pleasant greetings.

On behalf of these words, let us welcome you to our section. Since this may be your first time on our side of this page, please be cautioned that while Off Track is certainly not a gossip column, it is today, a column about gossip.

Yesterday I was asked by this paper to provide assistance in acquiring testimonials from locals about another local.

In order to make my point, if I do in fact get there, and in honor of yesterday’s Cinco de Mayo celebration, I will refer to our well-loved local as Pepé.

Pepé was my assumed assigned name in 10th grade Spanish.

There were four Jims on our class roster. We were all given Hispanic names to add credibility to our Caucasoid-ness. By the time our teacher, Senorita Ecker, named me, Santiago, Diego, and Jaime, all meaning James, had already been assigned. I was asked to become Pepé, a Spanish catchall word for Joe.

So, back to Pepé, our well-loved local and good ol’ Joe.

Yesterday, our local paper had been informed by several long-time locals that Pepé had passed away. Earlier in the week I had received this same unsettling, disruptive and horrible information.

Reluctantly, but swiftly, I began sharing Pepé’s unsettling, disruptive and horrible information with several other locals whom I deemed required recipients of this need-to-be-known-info.

After all, what good is bad news if it is not shared?

Realizing that our paper’s print deadline was in less than an hour, I really tried to expedite the acquisition of as many of Pepé’s testimonials of appreciation, admiration and adoration as I could.

After several phone calls to assorted key stalk-holders of our local non-profit news station, CNN (Concerned Nosey Neighbors), I realized that although Pepé had been rumored for several days to have passed, Pepé was, in fact and in hospital, alive.

By the time that I had finished my emergency calls, our local paper had further investigated, clarifying and dispelling the Pepé rumor before e-mailing me an apology.

That reminded me to get on my apology horse and ride like the wind, on gossiper wings.

I began calling the locals with whom I had prematurely shared the assumed passing of Pepé. Despite my inner knowing to “never say the thing that is disruptive,” I had, along with others, perpetuated an assumption.

I had, along with well-meaning others, affirmed the words of John Tudor, “A rumor without a leg to stand on will get around another way.”

While sharing my feeling of

stupidity for not checking my sources’ sources, a friend reminded me of her shock-filled gossip/rumor experience a few years ago at her church.

It seems that a relative of one of the congregates called the church office to arrange a memorial service for a deceased family member. As the sad news spread throughout the church community right before Sunday morning service, my friend, a church greeter, was breathless as she spotted the reportedly deceased congregate walking through the front doors.

As she gave the lady a church program, my friend welcomed her with the utmost enthusiasm — “It is absolutely wonderful to see you. We have all been so concerned. We had heard that you had…well…that you had been terribly sick.”

“No, dear, I feel fine. I have been enjoying myself on vacation for the last three weeks.”

On page 76 of Stuart Berg Flexner’s “Listening to America,” he writes that “Gossip is the Old English word ‘godsibb,’ ‘god kinsman,’ which meant a baptismal sponsor, or godparent, when first recorded in the year 1014. By 1362 it meant any close family acquaintance or friend, such as might be a godparent; then, by 1566, one who knows and spreads personal views and secrets, as a close friend might do.

Thus, in a little over 500 years, the word meaning changed from ‘godparent’ to ‘an intimate’ to ‘a spreader of intimate news.’ By 1811 gossip also meant the news or intimate talk itself.”

There is a Spanish proverb that we will share and enjoy with Pepé when we next speak. The proverb translated into English is: Whoever gossips to you, will gossip about you.

In the Marine Corps, we called gossip another word — scuttlebutt. According to Flexner, “In 1840, a scuttlebutt was a butt or cask of water with a small scuttle for opening for dipping out the contents.”

Since sailors like Pepé and jarheads like me have gathered around the scuttlebutt to get a drink of water and shoot the chat, the word has taken on another expression in our factories and offices — “water cooler talk.”

A few friends have suggested my immediate enrollment in a 12-step program for people who talk too much. The organization is called Onandonandon. Maybe I could be Chair, Share of the Gossip Department.

As I seldom shut my fly trap, or stay mum about the latest blab, letting the cat out of the bag like I am in the know to put a bug in someone’s ear, always spilling the beans, I can certainly identify these tell-tale signs of gossip: “Don’t tell anyone that I told you this, but…” “You won’t believe this, but…” and “Have you heard what they said?”

Dad always stopped me when I used the word “they” in a sentence.

Always.

“Who are they, Jimmy? Where are they? What do they know?”

Dad may have once read Buddha’s quote.

Or so I have been taught and told that the quote below was Buddha.

Where was CNN when Buddha was sitting under that big tree? How can we confirm this?

Buddha’s in Heaven! News at 11!

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”

Hey Pepé and Buddha, is it too late for me to start?