Taking a cue from Gaslight (1944), Lucy decides to make Cheever think he has gone crazy, so that he’ll agree to rehire Mr. I love how kooky this episode is WITHOUT managing to insult its audience’s intelligence.
To convince Cheever to give Mooney his job back, Lucy gives him the Gaslight treatment.
Lucy inadvertently gets Mooney fired after she covers up a bank shortage. The web page gives a plot summary and commentary: One of the 10 was “Lucy Gets Mooney Fired,” which aired in November 1967. There are obvious parallels to Gaslight, but I watched the episode here and I didn’t hear anything about “gaslighting.”īill Mullins replied: “I vaguely recall an episode of the The Lucy Show in which gaslighting is a plot element.” Mullins went to Google and and found a web page titled “The Ten Best THE LUCY SHOW Episodes of Season Six” (perhaps proving that there is a web page for every conceivable topic). There’s a 1956 I Love Lucy episode called “Lucy Meets Charles Boyer,” in which Ricky conspires with Charles Boyer to make Lucy think that Boyer is merely a lookalike. Lighter also said he has a strong memory of the verb’s being used in an episode of I Love Lucy the same year. Jonathan Lighter, editor of The Historical Dictionary of American Slang, responded that he had noted in the book an oral use from 1956, by a 41-year-old woman, revealed to be none other than his mother. Its first citation is a sentence from a 1965 article in the magazine The Reporter: “Some troubled persons having even gone so far as to charge malicious intent and premeditated ‘gaslighting.’” The quotation marks around the word are a sign that it was a recent coinage. As I noted on the ADS email list, in response to Baker and Zwicky, this use emerged some 20 years later, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. (Spoiler alert.) The Boyer character tries to drive the Bergman character (his wife) crazy, notably by insisting that the gaslights in their house did not flicker, when in fact they did.īut there is no verb gaslight in Gaslight. It inspired a 1940 British film and the more famous 1944 American production, directed by George Cukor and starring Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, and Charles Boyer. The history begins with Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light (known in the United States as Angel Street). From June 2016 through the end of the year, the Times used gaslighting 10 times, including a Susan Dominus essay called “The Reverse-Gaslighting of Donald Trump,” which riffed on Hillary Clinton’s line in a September debate: “Donald, I know you live in your own reality.”Īs so often happens when you get a lot of language observers together, the discussion shifted: from whether gaslight was newly prominent to precisely how old its verb use is. But there were only nine additional uses through May of last year. The New York Times first used the common gerund form, gaslighting, in 1995, in a Maureen Dowd column. The new prominence came from Donald Trump’s habitual tendency to say “X,” and then, at some later date, indignantly declare, “I did not say ‘X.’ In fact, I would never dream of saying ‘X.’” As Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS’s New Words Committee and language columnist for The Wall Street Journal, pointed out, The New Republic, Salon, CNN, The Texas Observer, and Teen Vogue (“Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America”) all used the metaphor as the basis for articles about Trump. The society addresses this issue in its press release on the voting: “The words or phrases do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year.” So does that apply to gaslight? Similarly, when I posted the winners on Facebook, my friend Pat Raccio Hughes commented, “How is that on the list? Isn’t it supposed to be new stuff?” She added that she and her husband had been using it since 1990.
#GASLIGHT ME MOVIE#
The movie that’s the source of the expression came out in 1944.” Did it come to some special prominence in 2016?” Arnold Zwicky chimed in: “Over seven decades, in fact. On the ADS email list, John Baker asked, “What is the rationale for naming ‘gaslight'…? The word has been around for decades. As Anne Curzan noted Monday in her report on the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year, the winner in the “Most Useful/Likely to Succeed” category was gaslight, a verb defined as to “psychologically manipulate a person into questioning their own sanity.” (Of course linguists would use singular they.)
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