The word “gaslight” gets thrown around so loosely today it’s hard to even remember its original meaning. In the 1944 movie Gaslight, an adaptation of a slightly older stage play also known as Angel Street, Ingrid Bergman’s character is lied to repeatedly, obviously, and systematically. She’s told the titular lights in the house are not dimming as she claims, when they clearly are. When she says she remembers reading a letter, she’s told she actually held nothing at all in her hands. She’s told she has inherited some form of mental disease. All of which is to make her ask: Am I going insane?
Undermining her confidence in her ability to remember her own past, perceive the world around her, and think rationally for herself breaks her grip on reality. That crucially suggests she has to defer to her husband’s authority about what’s true, not to her own mind and her own two eyes.
The horror of being subjected to this abusive process of manipulation clearly resonates with people. The term “gaslighting” caught on as a phrase that’s way more popular than the play or movie ever were. A September academic journal article even explored the “sociology of gaslighting,” arguing the concept is primarily a sociological phenomenon and shouldn’t be left to psychologists to characterize and understand.
“Gaslighting” still gets used to refer to a process of using lies to get people to question their own ability to ascertain truth. But more often, it’s also used to refer to garden-variety lying and even to simple differences of subjective interpretation. It has been transmuted from a psychological concept for a systematic pattern of abuse to our go-to explanation for why someone else might disagree with us.
It’s a bit like the term “toxic,” whose usage has grown in popularity alongside “gaslight.” It once was a way to draw a distinction between something — a person, a relationship — whose destructiveness had the imprimatur of expert psychological consensus, rather than merely bad or unpleasant. But “toxic,” like “gaslighting,” gets used so much and so injudiciously now that it can hardly be used to communicate some distinction between the ordinarily bad and the really, truly, radically, get-the-hell-outta-there bad.
Concept creep is also a process, but it’s not a systematic or intentional one. It’s when a once narrowly defined term starts to be used for more and more, until, in many cases, it can be used for anything. Some amount of this is the inevitable product of the fact that usage gives words public meaning. Every word gets used wrongly sometimes. But, like Ingrid Bergman and the lights, I am sure from the evidence of my own memory and my own two eyes that the process of concept creep is speeding up, especially for memeified terms from psychology and therapy.
What does it say that these are the terms we’re most eager to (over)apply? If language reflects cultural trends, this is a profoundly bad report on how we as a culture are losing the ability to assume good faith and shake off rather than indulge the feeling of being psychologically victimized. This behavior renders once-useful terms meaningless, making it harder and harder for language to maintain its grip on reality.
