Public medium, private talk: Gossip about a TV show as ‘quotidian hermeneutics’

This article examines how the interpenetration of the public and the private spheres is accomplished in discourse. My analysis of the interactions among family and friends that were prompted by the television program Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? shows how different voices from the public sphere are recycled and interpreted in private talk. I identify such conversations about the television show as gossip or a type of talk that Bakhtin (1975: 151) describes as ‘zhytejskaya germenevtika’, a term which was previously translated as ‘living hermeneutics’ (Bakhtin 1981: 338), but which I suggest is more accurately translated as ‘quotidian hermeneutics’ because it better captures Bakhtin's concept of the everyday nature of meaning-making in discourse. The analysis of audiotaped conversations among family and friends suggests that the public and the private are dialogically intertwined in private interaction and that television texts serve as valuable resources in how participants discuss private issues without getting personal, reinforce their own friendships, affirm shared values, and delight and entertain one another with gossip about a sensationalistic television event. By examining dialogic repetition, constructed dialogue, rhetorical questions, and other linguistic strategies, I demonstrate how speakers engage in ‘quotidian hermeneutics’ moment-to-moment in interaction.