φλύαρος

From the study of 1 Timothy 5:13

Range of meaning

Talking nonsense, babbling, foolish or silly in speech. The related noun phluaria means 'nonsense, drivel', and the verb phluareō means 'to talk nonsense about, to run someone down with empty words'.

Against the English

KJV 'tattlers' and modern 'gossips'. In modern English a gossip mainly spreads rumours or private information about other people. The Greek word centres on talk that is foolish, empty or worthless. That can include idle chatter about people, but the word itself is about the poor quality of the speech, not about the people being talked about.

How it drifted

'Gossip' originally meant a godparent or close friend (from 'god-sib'), then a woman's companion at a birth, then idle talk among women, and only later rumour-mongering. Using 'gossip' to translate phluaros brings in that later sense of telling tales about people.

Used elsewhere in the period

Used only here in the NT. The verb appears in 3 John 10, where Diotrephes is 'talking nonsense against us with wicked words'. In 4 Maccabees 5:11 the tyrant Antiochus calls the Jewish martyr's faith a 'nonsensical philosophy'. Greek moral writers such as Plutarch (in his essay On Talkativeness) treat empty, endless talk as a vice. Greek writers often used phluaria against teachings they considered foolish.