Talk:Gaslighting

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Etymology section.

There are the following statements in this section with which I have questions:

The gerund form gaslighting was first used in the 1950s, particularly in the episode of The Burns and Allen Show; in The New York Times, it was first used in a 1995 column by Maureen Dowd. According to the American Psychological Association in 2021, gaslighting "once referred to manipulation so extreme as to induce mental illness or to justify commitment of the gaslighted person to a psychiatric institution".^[1] Largely an obscure or esoteric term until gaining popularity in the mid-2010s – The New York Times only used it nine times in the following 20 years^[9] – it has seeped into the English lexicon...

1) The sentence order is awkward as is the writer's synthesis of the instances of use of the gerund "gaslighting" by the New York Times.

2) The writer's synthesis of the number of instances is wrong.

The main citation (#9) refers to an article dated January 12, 2017 by Ben Yagoda in the Lingua Franca blog, "How Old Is ‘Gaslighting’?" As seen in Wayback, the referred paragraph states:

"The New York Times first used the common gerund form, gaslighting, in 1995, in a Maureen Dowd column. But there were only nine additional uses through May of last year. 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.”"

1995 through May 2016 = 9 instances. THEN June 2016 through the end of 2016 = 10 MORE instances. That totals 19 instances between the 1995 Dowd column to the last day of 2016, not 9.

3) The referenced item for this paragraph is a column from _Lingua Franca,_ a blog. I cannot find anywhere on this website if this blog is considered a reliable source on Wikipedia or not. Does anybody know?

Thank you for your attention and your help, Wordreader (talk) 02:41, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Incorrect depiction of dimming as a trick used

This depiction is incorrect:

"One of the husband's tricks is to secretly dim and brighten the indoor gas-powered lighting ..."

That isn't a "trick used" (the citation is incorrect), it was the unintentional result of the husband lighting and turning up the gas in the attic during his searches, thus lowering the gas pressure.
But for fear of offending the Citation Gods, I haven't changed it BMJ-pdx (talk) 11:47, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, and I came here to say the same thing. What the husband does do it hide objects he then claims his wife has "lost." The dimming of the gaslights is, as you say, merely a byproduct of him turning up the gas to aid his search of unused parts of the house. Unfortunately, the citation - from Scientific American, no less - claims of the 1944 film:

"In it, the protagonist’s husband secretly dims and brightens the gas-powered indoor lights and insists she is imagining it, making her believe she is insane."

It's a long time since I saw the 1944 film, but this certainly isn't a feature of the 1940 film, nor the original stage play. This may well be one of those annoying instances in which a normally reliable source is provably factually incorrect. Nick Cooper (talk) 18:25, 23 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

While I agree that what you state is clearly true in the film, the article cites the play. I have no knowledge of the play's script: to what does it attribute the dimming of the lights? (Even if the description of the play's dimming is correct, the article should acknowledge that the film gives a different reasoning for the lights changing their brightness.) -- Dan Griscom (talk) 12:23, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]