Cast your mind back to summer 2018 and you might remember domestic violence charity Women’s Aid releasing a statement about Love Island contestant Adam Collard’s ‘gaslighting’ of Rosie Williamsand warning of the signs to look out for.
Though the term was first coined in the mid-twentieth century, it was arguably the turn of events on the nation’s favourite dating show that brought gaslighting to the fore of popular lexicon and now, over four years later, it’s been named Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2022.
According to the American dictionary publisher, searches for the word were up 1740% this year, with it’s meaning having evolved in keeping with its modern usage.
‘Its origins are colourful,’ reads the official Merrian-Webster website. ‘The term comes from the title of a 1938 play and the movie based on that play, the plot of which involves a man attempting to make his wife believe that she is going insane. His mysterious activities in the attic cause the house’s gas lights to dim, but he insists to his wife that the lights are not dimming and that she can’t trust her own perceptions.
‘But in recent years, we have seenthe meaning of gaslighting refer also to something simpler and broader: “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for a personal advantage.” In this use, the word is at home with other terms relating to modern forms of deception and manipulation, such as fake news, deepfake, and artificial intelligence.’
Why exactly has the word sprung back up all of a sudden, four years after a pop-culture moment first propelled it into the limelight and started a national conversation about the more sinister tactics of coercive control? A cursory glance over the news of the last twelve months will show that the term ‘gaslighting’ has been adopted broadly in everything from medical reports – ‘medical gaslighting’ has been used to describe the (all too common for women especially) phenomenon of having health concerned dismissed or diminished by doctors - to accusations against the Conservative government for gaslighting the public over, say, justifying Christmas parties during full lockdowns or the (entirely self-inflicted) pinch on the public purse strings to excuse extortionate tax hikes.
The biggest news story of 2022 where the term gaslighting has been thrown around the most was the very public court battle between Jonny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard, which played out over the summer. Gaslighting was an accusation levied at both Jonny and Amber with equal velocity. Amber was reproached for it when an incriminating audio recording of her calling Jonny ‘a baby’ was used in court, with many turning on her for supposedly exploiting the ‘believe victims’ narrative to unfairly demonise her ex-husband. Some feminists argued the opposite, that Jonny was gaslighting the jury (and the public) into believing that HIS story was the exception to the rule, the proof that women could also be abusers.
The global speculation about the messy demise of this couples’ relationship utilised a buzzword which had already been gaining momentum in colloquial language, and the huge increases in searches prove that people were googling the word’s meaning to work out how exactly they could apply it to the version of events which most suited their bias.
Either way, the case served to turn a word with its origins in war-time literature, which had already seen a small publicity boost thanks the underhand tactics of a contestant on a British reality show, into one dictionary publisher’s word of the year, beating the likes of 'oligarch' (as in, the oligarchs named and shamed for hoarding wealth in London property at the outbreak of the Ukraine war), Queen Consort (the female spouse of the UK head of state and the first one most of us will have known in our lifetimes) and Omicron (this one is obvious) to the top spot.