#By gaslight meaning full#
They might deny things you know they said, or claim full events (like violence or verbal abuse) didn’t happen at all. This may then escalate to flat-out lying about events. It can start with seemingly inconsequential physical things – such as the abuser moving an item you put down, then suggesting you misplaced it when you ask for help finding it.
Per the AP, Merriam-Webster chooses its word of the year “based solely on data.” Sokolowski and his team comb through a given year’s most-searched words, removing more timeless “evergreen words.” In 2020, the word of the year was “ pandemic.” Last year’s word was “ vaccine.”Īfter “gaslighting,” Merriam-Webster’s top-ten picks include “oligarch,” “omicron,” “codify,” “LGBTQIA,” “sentient,” “raid,” “queen consort” and “loamy,” which spiked when it became one of the answers to Quordle, a spin-off of the popular game Wordle.The goal for the gaslighter is to make their victim undermine their own judgement and reduce their self-esteem, making the victim dependent on the abuser for longer. The 1944 adaptation, Gaslight, stars Ingrid Bergman as the mistreated wife and Charles Boyer as the master manipulator-or gaslighter, as he might be called today. In the years that followed, the play was adapted twice for the big screen. The 1944 film Gaslight follows a manipulative husband who tries to convince his wife that she's going insane.
When Bella complains that the gas light in their house is dimming, Jack assures her that it’s all in her head. The thriller follows a man named Jack, who becomes intent on convincing his wife, Bella, that she’s going insane. Though the inescapable presence of “gaslighting” in the zeitgeist is a recent phenomenon, the term itself dates back to Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light. The second, a bit more succinct, defines “gaslighting” as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.” The first describes it as “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.” The dictionary offers two definitions for the term. Informed by those impressive statistics, Merriam-Webster has designated “gaslighting” as its official word of the year. Interest in the word was sustained throughout the entire year: Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, tells Leanne Italie of the Associated Press (AP) that the word stayed in Merriam-Webster’s top 50 list of most-searched words for all of 2022. Maybe that’s why Merriam-Webster saw a staggering 1,740 percent increase in searches for “gaslighting” in its online dictionary in 2022. Maloney declared in a September statement that “Big Oil is ‘gaslighting’ the public.” The word can also be used to describe individuals across contexts, from romantic partners to politicians. People suffering from long Covid took up the term “ medical gaslighting” to describe the medical establishment’s inappropriate dismissal of their symptoms.
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