Patents on the soles of your shoes...: Terminology: WOTTIES 2022

Friday, December 9, 2022

Terminology: WOTTIES 2022 - Merriam-Webster "gaslighting" (1)

Merriam-Webster has selected gaslighting, “the act of grossly misleading someone, especially for one’s own advantage”, as the Word of the Year (WOTY) 2022.

Gaslighting is a term imported into the English language from the 1944 American psychological thriller, titled Gaslight. A big screen adaptation of the 1938 British theatre play, Gas Light by Patrick Hamilton, and blockbuster that received no less than seven Academy Award nominations, and won two, for Best Actress (Ingrid Bergman), and Best Production Design.

Gaslight was the macabre story of a husband scheming to drive his wife crazy with lies and deceit, for the usual mix of envy, greed, lust and ambition. As a result, the meaning of the term gaslighting, in 1950:

[...] psychological manipulation intended to make a person 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 [Merriam-Webster]

was tightly correlated to the movie, and slightly different from the meaning in 2022, where it has become consonant with modern forms of personal and political deception, mediated by a vast array of technologies, such as fake news, deepfake, and AI in marketing.

To further circumscribe the meaning of gaslighting in 2022, Merriam-Webster distinguishes the term gaslighting from other terms, expressing deceit. Terms such as lying –which is personal, fraud –which involves organizations, and the more euphemistic, such as falsehood, untruth and prevarication, or the innocuous term fib. Additionally, Merriam-Webster offers the following examples of usage, extracted from various mainstream sources:

"I am sorry you feel this way” approach, along with avoiding an argument in lieu of admitting fault, is good old fashioned gaslighting. [Psychology Today]

Patients, who have felt that their symptoms were inappropriately dismissed as minor or primarily psychological by doctors, are using the term “medical gaslighting” to describe their experiences and stories. [New York Times, March 28, 2022.]

My Committee’s investigation leaves no doubt that, in the words of one company official, Big Oil is gaslighting the public. [Rep. Carolyn R. Maloney, Chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, Sept. 14, 2022.]

In any event, the true meaning of gaslighting might lie in the numbers (no pun intended). With so many diversified technologies and channels of communication, available to mislead and disinform, searches for the term gaslighting this year spiked a whopping 1740% online at Merriam-Webster, conferring without contest the title of Merriam-Webster WOTY 2022 to gaslighting.