gossip mirror

Calqued from a Nordic language; compare Swedish skvallerspegel, Finnish juorupeili.

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gossip mirror (plural gossip mirrors)

1. A mirror or pair of mirrors mounted outside a window, allowing the viewer to see along the street while remaining indoors.

   Synonym: street mirror

   • 1952, March Cost, The Hour Awaits‎^[1], Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott & Co., page 86:

     Hand in hand after dinner they wandered through the streets of narrow, stilted houses with heavy, ornate balconies and brilliant doors, set in dull yellow or olive stucco, and their passage was reflected at all angles from the gossip-mirror adroitly fixed to every window.

   • 1995 [1880], Jens Peter Jacobsen, translated by Tiina Nunnally, Niels Lyhne‎^[2], Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, →ISBN, page 131; republished Seattle, WA: Fjord Press, 1998:

     There was something of a winter evening’s coziness over the room — to be shut inside four walls — and besides, it was so good to have rain, everything needed water so badly, and when it really pelted down and drummed with heavy drops on the casing of the gossip mirror, the sound called up fleeting, blurred images of lush green fields and fresh leaves, and someone would exclaim to himself: "Look how it’s raining!" and gaze at the windowpanes with a feeling of contentedness and with a little spark of pleasure, in a half-conscious communion with what was outside.

   • 2008, Kathie Meizner, Lisa Nevans Locke and Meg Thale, editors, Going Places with Children in Washington, DC‎^[3], 17th edition, Rockville, MD: Green Acres School, →ISBN, page 349:

     Children also enjoy walking on a cobblestone street while looking for boot scrapers, gossip mirrors and historical artifacts.

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