![]() It inspired a 1940 British film and the more famous 1944 American production, directed by George Cukor and starring Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, and Charles Boyer. The history begins with Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light (known in the United States as Angel Street). ![]() ![]() From June 2016 through the end of the year, the Times used gaslighting 10 times, including a Susan Dominus essay called “The Reverse-Gaslighting of Donald Trump,” which riffed on Hillary Clinton’s line in a September debate: “Donald, I know you live in your own reality.”Īs so often happens when you get a lot of language observers together, the discussion shifted: from whether gaslight was newly prominent to precisely how old its verb use is. But there were only nine additional uses through May of last year. The New York Times first used the common gerund form, gaslighting, in 1995, in a Maureen Dowd column. The new prominence came from Donald Trump’s habitual tendency to say “X,” and then, at some later date, indignantly declare, “I did not say ‘X.’ In fact, I would never dream of saying ‘X.’” As Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS’s New Words Committee and language columnist for The Wall Street Journal, pointed out, The New Republic, Salon, CNN, The Texas Observer, and Teen Vogue (“Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America”) all used the metaphor as the basis for articles about Trump. The society addressed this issue in its press release on the voting: “The words or phrases do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year.” So does that apply to gaslight? Similarly, when I posted the winners on Facebook, my friend Pat Raccio Hughes commented, “How is that on the list? Isn’t it supposed to be new stuff?” She added that she and her husband had been using it since 1990. The movie that’s the source of the expression came out in 1944.” Did it come to some special prominence in 2016?” Arnold Zwicky chimed in: “Over seven decades, in fact. On the ADS email list, John Baker asked, “What is the rationale for naming ‘gaslight’…? The word has been around for decades. The winner in the “Most Useful/Likely to Succeed” category was gaslight, a verb is defined as to “psychologically manipulate a person into questioning their own sanity.” (Of course linguists would use singular they.) The American Dialect Society met in January and chose dumpster fire as Word of the Year. ![]() Others took up the theme, inspiring me to repost my 2017 historical investigation of “gaslight,’ the verb. “Lucy says ‘don’t gaslight me’ and it’s so annoying! There is no way she would have said that in the 1950s. A couple of days ago, Roxane Gay took to Twitter with a complaint about the new movie “Being the Ricardos”: ![]()
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