As a person who writes about honesty and deception, I felt a spark of hope Monday when I found out that Merriam-Webster had made “gaslighting” the official word of the year for 2022.
Maybe, just maybe, people are finally ready to engage with dishonesty and how it operates in their lives.
But for goodness’ sake, what took so long?
We have to engage with issues like gaslighting, including all the ugliness of the ways it’s been done in the past and the ways it’s still happening today. And, here’s the real rub, the ways we do it ourselves.
Gaslighting, as Merriam-Webster defines it, is “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.” Our friends at the dictionary choose every year’s word based solely on data: This year saw a 1,740% increase in lookups on Merriam-Webster’s site for the term gaslighting.
But the term sprung from a movie that came out in 1944. “Gaslight,” set in the 1880s when lamps were fueled by gas, depicts a husband manipulating his wife into believing she’s crazy. His goal is to commit her to an asylum, find the jewels her aunt had hidden in the attic and claim her fortune as his own. Whenever he is in the attic looking for the jewels, he turns on the lights, which, because of the way the gas works, causes the light to dim in other parts of the house. But he repeatedly tells his wife she’s imagining the dimming.
Personally, I first heard the term a full decade ago, when a friend of mine was getting divorced. “He’s gaslighting me,” she told me, explaining the plot of the movie, and how the term evolved to describe lying, manipulative behavior like her husband employed.
Today, gaslighting can mean everything from being dismissive of someone’s feelings and experiences to conducting a large-scale psychological manipulation that makes people question what they know to be true.
It’s a term that works in both the macro and the micro, as at home in conversations about national security as it is in the DMs of 12-year-old girls (I have one, so I know this firsthand). It is the feeling of being defrauded, lied to and disregarded completely on purpose for self-interested and dishonest reasons.
No surprise, a lot of people searched for this word in 2022.
Americans surely had cause to use it during the Jan. 6 hearings, with their explosive testimony about former President Donald Trump’s master gaslighting of the American public, claiming that he won an election he lost. And…
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