Semantics

The gas lights in dad's house, before the REA brought electricity in 1948, were acetylene. Well, at least before conversion to CO, CO2, and H2O.

The generator tank still pokes up from a hump in the back yard. In my younger days, I remember numerous empty calcium carbide canisters in the nearby household dump, a place to harvest scrap metal and unknown toxics.

 

(Light) Psychology websites are all over this:
Gaslighting | Psychology Today
https://positivepsychology.com/gaslighting-emotional-abuse/
https://www.psycom.net/gaslighting-what-is-it
You’re Not Going Crazy: 15 Signs You’re a Victim of Gaslighting ⋆ LonerWolf

So it boils down to how much verbage one is willing to read and use. Gaslighters are negatively portrayed there. So, maybe, no one posting hereabouts is icky like that. Thus it should be hoped? Right? I mean, I guess?

 

i'm too old to follow all this new terminology. as soon as i see 'ghosted' and the like, i move on

 

Some expressions that leave me bemused:

Gas lighting
Thrown under the bus
I’ll own that
Fast forward
I could care less
Mainstream media

 

Archaic expressions we still use:

hang up (a phone call)
Tape (audio recording) < or video I think

 

i have been unable to say, 'did you dvr it?'

 

Words NOBODY uses, outside of commericals or accompanied by air-quote marks:

beverage
adult beverage

 

No, that was last year. Don't you remember? We all remember.

 

I have heard people in Britain say, "Are you coming out for a beveragino?"

I did not kill them. I regret this.

 

My understanding is that it is not a metaphor about CO or CO2, but a reference to a film.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslight_(1944_film)

For those who can't currently access Wikipedia:

Gaslight is a 1944 American psychological thriller film directed by George Cukor, and starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten and Angela Lansbury in her film debut. Adapted by John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, and John L. Balderston from Patrick Hamilton's play Gas Light (1938), it follows a young woman whose husband slowly manipulates her into believing that she is descending into insanity.[4][5]

.....

Denominalization of the play's title
Further information: Gaslighting

Self-help and popular psychology authors sometimes denominalize the film's title (also known as "verbing") and use it as a verb. Gaslighting, in this context, refers to manipulating a person or a group of people, in a way similar to the way the protagonist in the film was manipulated.[14]
​

 

Before my time, I'm afraid.

 

This is a weird one.

In the rest of the English speaking world, we say "I couldn't care less". It means "I care so little about this thing that it would be impossible for me to care any less about it." But in the US (and Canada? I don't know), they say "I could care less" to mean the same thing, which makes no sense at all.

 

There were two: 1940 with Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard, and 1944 with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. The earlier one is said to be closer to the 1938 stage play.

The names of the married couple get gratuitously changed for each version: in the stage play they are Jack and Bella Manningham, in the 1940 film, they are Paul and Bella Mallen, and in the later one, Gregory and Paula Anton.

Whatever their names are, he acts deliberately to get her to doubt her own sanity and her own direct observations.

Spoiler

He hides things around the house and then accuses her of having moved them when she has no memory of doing so. He tells her certain letters never arrived in the mail even though she saw them in the pile before he hid them. He tells her she imagines the noises in the house created by his covert criminal activity, and the effects it has on the gas pressure, seen in the brightness of the gas lights. By bringing her to such overwhelming self-doubt, he keeps her helpless, compliant, isolated from others, and out of his way, while also making her less likely to be believed if she should happen to say anything.

'Gaslighting' is kind of an important word to have to mean that exact kind of thing, because there aren't a lot of other words that do. There are lots of kinds of dishonesty, demagoguery, or bullshitting that aren't gaslighting.

I've seen it at work in some different married couples I've known. In one, he was treating her with pretty much perpetual disrespect, as many of her friends had observed, but he could usually convince her that it was her friends showing her disrespect if they said anything about it, and use that to isolate her from them.

In the other couple, the wife had become an early and hardcore devotee of a newly-created news outlet in the mid-1990s, but she and her husband would have stark disagreements over how credible it was, and while she wanted to convert him, for nearly ten years that wasn't going anywhere.

Then, however, he suffered an accidental head injury that left him with a temporary—but super frightening—cognitive impairment. He got over it, but she had a new tool afterward for her efforts to convert him: she would bring up that episode again like clockwork if he wasn't agreeing with her, and play up his lingering terror of losing his reason, to imply he'd have to be agreeing with her if he were in his right mind.

Gaslighting.

In current public affairs, I'm not sure everything that's getting called 'gaslighting' really is. Saying "normal tourist visit" to people who were in a building violently breached in an attack that targeted them is probably a solid example of gaslighting, because it has that clear you-didn't-see-what-you-saw quality. But a lot of stuff that's dishonest in various other ways isn't necessarily gaslighting.

I guess I'd class that as one of those linguistic changes driven by ease of articulation and not by consciousness of the meaning, sort of like "I couldn't care less" with a silent, dropped "n't". (It's pretty easy for that "n't" to get swallowed there, unless you are trying really hard to enunciate like a schoolmarm.)

Of course, people use it that way in writing too, the same way they hear it. Very different from the way we still write the k and gh in knight, even though it hasn't sounded like that for hundreds of years.

 

Yes, that's right. Or I think it is. Are you just telling me it is? Oh no!

Very true. It's like the misuse of "selfie", but obviously it has the potential to be rather more damaging.

These both sound awful.

I've seen similar things to your first example.

The second sounds terrible.

 

As of this writing, both films show up on The Roku Channel for streaming—and they are both listed there as "Gaslight (1940)". You can click each one to see which is which.

I'd say that isn't an attempt at gaslighting, so much as about par for the course for The Roku Channel's data-entry standards.

 

That's genius. I hope it's deliberate.

 

Could be. Although it seems to be a fairly modern term.

The "n't" would, for my parents, be a "nae", so it wouldnae get swallowed in the same way.

 

Was just going to posit what Chapman said about it. It is amusing the bit being dropped here was a bit originally condensed by the same process.

 

Total agreement; it’s a mangled approximation of the original expression. Still, knowing the correct phrase will not stop the flood.

 

One can hope, but then, it is The Roku Channel, where I've seen other films that weren't even at all the film described in the listing.

Unrelated, but another fun Rokuism:

Have you ever tried using a Linux system to play DVD movies that used a certain copy-protection scheme? There seemed to be a short period where that scheme was in use and it quickly went away, but I've had a few DVDs that used it.

The scheme was that the DVD would have all the scenes of the film, of course, and a completely full table of contents (not the one you see on the screen when you play it, but the low-level one on the disc), 99 entries (which in DVD tech-speak are called "titles"), and each title would have some of the scenes on the disc in some order, but there would be only one of the 99 that had all the right scenes in the right order.

Which of the 99 titles was the right one would be encoded on the disc in a way that most DVD players would be able to decode (or players on a commercial OS like Mac or Windows) so all of that was transparent, the player would select the right title, and you'd just see the movie. But using something like a Linux DVD player app that was missing that ability, it'd just play title 1 by default, and you'd get part-way into this hodge-podge of scenes in the wrong order and think "no movie is this confusing!" and try some of the other 98 titles until you found the right one.

So, that was a lot of background, but here's the punch line: I streamed a Roku movie once that had all the scenes shuffled, and many of them repeated, exactly the same way they are when you've picked the wrong title on one of those DVDs. I don't know if they get some of their content by ripping it from old DVDs, but if they did, it would perfectly explain what they had. And nobody noticed, and they just happily streamed it out that way.

Wasn't anything I could control, so I just watched it that way, and treated it as a sort of jigsaw puzzle.