‘Gaslighting’ Takes the Cake… Finally

Six years after I first wrote about gaslighting in an early Resistance blog, it finally makes it to the Big Leagues: As Merriam Webster names it Word of the Year for 2022

On November 21, 2016, I was on a plane to San Francisco when I was struck by a word. I finally figured out what we were fighting: gaslighting. I immediately dashed off a column on my Maewestside Tumblr, ‘Crazy Making’ and Other Signs of Madness, where I referenced gaslighting for the first time in relation to Trump. A few days later I wrote another column where I spelled it out in greater depth, ‘A Real Genuine Phony: And Other Tales of Gaslighting’.

I am a cinephile and having watched Charles Boyer gaslight Ingrid Bergman in George Cukor’s 1944 film, ‘Gas Light’, I understood what it was like to steal someone’s reality. I had also directed a film on verbal abuse, and ‘Crazy Making’ was unfortunately familiar to me. As a wordsmith in an information war, I was always proud of the fact that I beat Teen Vogue to the word by three weeks.

As Merriam Webster announces its word of the year 2022 is ‘gaslighting’, due to an increase in global curiosity, thank the writers, the resistors, and the activists, who refuse to allow reality to go undefended.

Our duty as those who fight fascism is to reassure everyone that a shared reality does exist and that truth is always worth defending.