![]() ![]() This made the term trickle into academic and formal usage - especially in the field of psychology. Often, this was against their will - when others deemed them to be “mad.” But gaslighting is much more insidious for how it turns an individual against themselves, making them willing participants in the theater of false reality constructed by a manipulator. At the time (Victorian era England), madness was intimately related to women, and it was very easy to commit women to asylums. In the context of the original play, where the phenomenon was first given a name, the husband’s plot was to institutionalize his wife for her money. There’s also an institutional component to gaslighting: it works because nobody else believes the survivor. A name for the phenomenon then brings them back in control - making it a tactic that’s far more damaging than just manipulation. The minds of survivors of gaslighting are “hijacked” by someone else - unable to grasp or interpret their own reality. It describes a form of abuse that previously had no name because it was designed to not ever be made sense of. Gaslighting, then, is dark and twisted its meaning performing a specific function. Since then, it’s become a word to describe intimate partner abuse - or just abuse of any kind - in which one person denies tangible facts of reality to another in order to make them question their own perception and sanity. The term came from a 1938 play called Gaslight - about an abusive marriage in which the husband flickers the gaslights in the house and denies doing so in order to drive his wife to madness. The possibilities are limitless: the word gaslight itself can gaslight us into thinking it means something else. Anyone indelicately phrasing disagreement could be gaslighting you. It’s a word that’s reached a point of ubiquity: anything, anyone, and anywhere can both gaslight and be gaslit, and it no longer has a specific meaning. But what is it? See if you can glean it from this tweet, made amid the Twitter controversies this week and in response to a take that the app wasn’t shutting down: “Gaslighting the app into not shutting down is certainly a tactic lmao.” In Words Mean Things, we unpack weighty words whose meanings have been sacrificed to hot takes. ![]()
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