From lies to gaslighting – rabble.ca

Arctic Indigenous people have many words to describe snow and its various colours. Aleut speaking peoples reportedly have 50 words for snow. Since snow is a significant part of their daily life, the richness of the relevant vocabulary comes as no surprise. Perhaps for the same reason the list of words for lie in modern English is equally impressive and keeps extending. One of them, gaslighting, has recently become Merriam-Webster’s word of the year 2022 because of its growing popularity.

Merriam-Webster’s includes more than 10 words to the list of synonyms for lie: falsehood, untruth, fraud, deceitfulness, prevarication, dissemble, disinformation, manipulation, fake news, and deepfake. Gaslighting is just the latest. Google Trends show that internet users in English-speaking countries started to look up definitions for gaslighting since the second half of the 2010s. British and American English seems to be particularly affected, although similar trends are observed in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (see the chart).

While Google Books allows comparing English-language books published in the US and the UK only, this databank has the advantage of covering a longer period. About five per cent of all books published since 1800 are indexed. Until the start of the 20th century the term ‘gaslighting’ was mostly used literally, in relation to gaslight, a lamp which operates by burning piped illuminating gas. A figurative meaning has been attached to this term relatively recently. A surge in its relative frequency on pages books published in the US and the UK observed since the second half of the 2010s is likely attributable to gaslighting defined figuratively (see the chart, the red curve depicts relative frequencies of gaslighting on pages of books published in the UK, the red – in the US).

In its figurative sense, gaslighting means manipulation by using particularly sophisticated means of deception. A person subject to gaslighting loses touch with reality, starting to question everywhere the boundary between true and false. It may happen within the family with an abusive partner or within an organization, where gaslighting becomes a dimension of bullying; or in politics, because of the unavailability of valid information and the spread of misinformation.

A closer look at publications in the newspapers of record from the five English-speaking countries suggests that few, if any, institutions…