We Wore Out a Perfectly Good Word in About Four Years

In Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light, a husband hunts the attic at night for jewels hidden in the house. The work draws gas from the rest of the pipes, so downstairs the lamps dim. His wife notices. He tells her they are not dimming.

That is the machine. Not an argument and not unkindness — a sustained campaign to make a person distrust the evidence of her own eyes, run by the one man best placed to know she is right.

In 2022 Merriam-Webster made “gaslighting” its word of the year. Lookups were up 1,740 per cent, and not on a single spike: every day of the year.

You know what happened next, because you watched it happen to the word.

A pastor asked a hard question about the building fund tells his board they are gaslighting him. A student committee whose funding request fails on a technicality announces that the administration is gaslighting the student body. Different rooms, different quarters, one move — an unwelcome answer converted into an assault, and whoever received it converted into somebody owed something. Instantly, for free, in one word.

That is the appeal, so let us be plain: the word is not being misunderstood. It is being upgraded to. He disagreed with me and I found it annoying is a weaker sentence, and we reach past it on purpose.

Here is the cost. Somewhere a woman is in the fourth year of being told the lights are not dimming. A word stretched to cover everything stops covering anything. When the word also covers a colleague misremembering a deadline, she reaches for the only one that ever described her life and it arrives already spent.

The bill for inflating a word is never paid by whoever inflated it. It goes to whoever needed it to mean something.

That is wrong — not gauche, wrong: it takes something from someone who cannot spare it, to win an argument that did not matter.

The repair is embarrassingly cheap. He disagreed with me is a sentence. She remembers it differently is a sentence. Neither makes you the wronged party — which is exactly why they are hard to say, and why they are worth saying.

Say the smaller true thing. Leave the big word where it is. Someone is going to need it.