anecdotage
/ˈanɪkdəʊtɪdʒ
/noun [mass noun]
1Anecdotes collectively: a number of reports cannot be dismissed as anecdotage...
- The lively scientific spat between Professors Higgs and Hawking has trailed a predictable plethora of anecdotage in its wake, much of it designed to illustrate Hawking's ‘mischievous sense of humour’.
- Knowing the facts's very important; knowing the people helps (there's a fair bit of anecdotage and I-was-there-ism in Hitchens's journalism).
- Surely so important a figure in Indian cinema and so charismatic a star deserves something better than anecdotage, gossip and platitudes for the story of his life, career and times.
2 humorous Old age, especially in someone who is inclined to be garrulous: it is not within many of us to emulate such a feat in our anecdotage...
- Happy to slip into their anecdotage, they affectionately remember the stresses and strains of life on the factory floor, touring, recording and funding a funeral parlour that become their safe haven when it all became too much to bear.
- There is the tendency, to be found in all politicians in their anecdotage, to make copious reference to her own previous speeches of five, 10 and 20 years ago.
- The fruity little tale he told about the double entendre he had committed regarding the French prime minister said it all: this was an elder statesman in his anecdotage.
From a blend of anecdote and dotage