or else never achieved it, it does not communicate in the mode of a primordial appropriation of this being, but communicates by gossiping and passing the word along. What is spoken about as such spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative character. Things are so because one says so. Idle talk is constituted in this gossiping and passing the word along, a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on increases to complete groundlessness [Bodenlosigkeit]. And this is not limited to vocal gossip, but spreads to what is written, as [169] "scribbling." In this latter case, gossiping is based not so much on hearsay. It feeds on sporadic superficial reading: the average understanding of the reader will never be able to decide what has been drawn from primordial sources with a struggle, and how much is just gossip. Moreover, the average understanding will not even want such a distinction, will not have need of it, since, after all, it understands everything.
The groundlessness of idle talk is no obstacle to its being public, but encourages it. Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk already guards against the danger of getting stranded in such an appropriation. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer.
Discourse, which belongs to the essential constitution of the being of Dasein, and also constitutes its disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk, and as such of not really keeping being-in-the-world open in an articulated understanding, but of closing it off and covering over innerworldly beings. To do this, one need not aim to deceive. Idle talk does not have the kind of being of consciously passing off something as something else. The fact that one has said something groundlessly and then passes it along in further retelling is sufficient to turn disclosing around into a closing off. For what is said is initially always understood as "telling," that is, as discovering. Thus, by its very nature, idle talk is a closing off since it omits going back to the foundation of what is bing talked about.
This closing off is aggravated anew by the fact that idle talk, in which an understanding of what is being talked about is supposedly reached, holds any new questioning and discussion at a distance because it presumes it has understood, and in a peculiar way it suppresses them and holds them back.
This interpretedness of idle talk has always already settled itself down in Dasein. We get to know many things initially in this way, and some things never get beyond such an average understanding. Dasein can never escape the everyday way of being interpreted into which Dasein has grown initially. All genuine understanding, interpreting and communication, rediscovery and new appropriation come about in it, out of it, and against it. It is not the case that a Dasein, untouched