Suppose one day you encounter your sister in law who is running errands, and as an aside, she mentions that her husband, your brother, had been sick with a 24-hour stomach bug, that had him vomiting a lot the day before, but was, at the time of your conversation, convalescent, and in fact, going to work that day. At some point on that day or the next, you might also speak with your mother (who is much closer to your sister-in-law than you are) briefly. Then, two days after the sister-in-law encounter, you speak again with your mother, who has just learned of your brother's illness for the first time, and castigates you for not telling her.

Is the response "It's none of your business, if he (or his wife) did not choose to tell you themselves," acceptable or accurate?

In her defense, I realize that there might be some ingrained passive-aggressive issues here which cause me to strenuously avoid sharing information with my mother if I can help, possibly in reaction to being told "look it up" so often as a kid. She actually placed a set of encylopedias on a ground-level shelf when I was a child, because I seemed to think that a stay at home mother was an acceptable source for explanations of how the world worked and the discrepancies between her and my father's version and that proffered by my teachers and those very encyclopedias. Also, with no training, "look it up" is a difficult proposition for a preschooler, who finds the sorting of encyclopedias by alphabetical order, rather than subject matter to be really, really stupid. Then things happen, like one book having an anecdote about the origins of the Teddy Bear, and another being a children's biography of the eponymous president, and then you see a book WAY high up on the bookshelf called "Teddy Bare" and being a little too young to keep track of spelling discrepancies, embark upon a bookshelf climbing trip to pull down a boring, mostly-words-and-few-pictures, grown-up book about a Senator's (who was NOT named Theodore) car accident in some place you can't even pronounce, and absolutely no reference to the great hunter-boxer-soldier president OR a plush toy, just was seems a very unimaginative title. All in all, I think someone who beats the "find out things on your own, and especially don't rely on personal exchanges of data between you and me" notion into a human being in his formative stages has no room to complain a lack of data-sharing, particularly of the irrelevant kind, thirty years later.

But maybe that's just me. A lot of you people seem to be of the center-left, play-nice, there-is-something-wrong-with-you-Cannoli mindset as she, so how much of a leg does she have to stand on?