It’s getting to be that time of year when we try to think back about what this orbit of the sun all meant. That means looking back for some. And for dictionaries, it means the word of the year. Merriam-Webster’s word of the year runner-up a decade ago was a former “Word of the Week”: malarkey. In 2012, then-Vice President Joe Biden used the charmingly old-timey term, later to be part of his primary campaign sloganeering, in his debate with Paul Ryan. 2022’s word of the year from Merriam-Webster (and another previous “Word of the Week”) is a synonym to malarkey (or at least a related concept): gaslighting. According to the American dictionary publisher, “in this age of misinformation — of ‘fake news,’ conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes — gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time. A driver of disorientation and mistrust, gaslighting is ‘the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.’”

As I wrote in the “Word of the Week” column about “gaslight” and its growing misuse, “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?”