As a person who writes about honesty and deception, I felt a spark of hope Monday when I found out that Merriam-Webster had made “gaslighting” the official word of the year for 2022.
We have to engage with issues like gaslighting, including all the ugliness of the ways it’s been done in the past and the ways it’s still happening today.
Gaslighting, as Merriam-Webster defines it, is “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.” Our friends at the dictionary choose every year’s word based solely on data: This year saw a 1,740% increase in lookups on Merriam-Webster’s site for the term gaslighting.
So while gaslighting is very 2022, it also could have been the word of the year many times before now — indeed, in nearly every period of American history.
If we all did this, maybe the word of the year for 2023 would be self-awareness.