Primus Detractor and the other "backbiters" can't at first participate in this communal spirit, as they don't know the truth that lies within Mary.

Her ability thus reveals this woman to be not a backbiter, but a veritable strategist, whose compelling manipulation of the enemy ends up saving Sidi Mezouar and the villagers in general.

Backbiter exults that she is pregnant not by "pat old shrewe

This examination will begin by discussing the earlier Castle of Perseverance and follow with a discussion of the N-Town "Trial" play in an effort to show the impact of the dissident quality of Backbiter's rhetoric--indeed, Backbiter as rhetoric--upon the operations of the plays.

What little commentary we have generally echoes Rosemary Woolf's observation that while the detractors function in the play as witnesses in a medieval Church court, their character is drawn from the "stock sermon type of the backbiter," that common and uncomplicated figure distinguished by his "agile tongue and malicious delight in the spreading of rumor."(1) This familiar version of the backbiter earns an indisputable place among the horizons of expectations we must bring to the play.

(780-81, 1784-86) (19) The theme of the backbiter as source of communal division is at least as old as Paul's letter to the Ephesians listing "brawling and slander" among the breaches of the unity of the spirit (4:31).

Backbiters have a field day on Facebook because, to them, Facebook is like war and all is fair, though those with no backbone never name names and smile with no compunction at those whose names they should have given.

Remember that backbiters and scandal-mongers belong to a mean and cunning group, though they pretend to be sincere advisers.

A good example of the virulence of the attacks against backbiters is The Evil Tongue Tryed and Found Guilty (1672), in which Stephen Ford denounces "the hainous, horrid, and hurtful nature of the sin of slandering" (92).

And with Labour under Jeremy Corbyn ahead in the polls for the first time, the backbiters and doubters need to get behind him and really go for the Tory jugular.

We can defend ourselves from robbers, but how do we defend ourselves from rumormongers and backbiters? We can't.

But you can't ignore the world's narcissists, passive-aggressive backbiters, or control freaks.

"She's a liar and a cheat and we're gunna prove it to the barristers and the jurors and the backbiters who dragged my name through the mud and who sent a good man to an early grave.