MovieChat Forums > Being the Ricardos (2021) Discussion > Question for any OLD people here: able t...

Question for any OLD people here: able to verify that nobody used the word "gaslight" as a verb until around 2016?


In this movie Lucy tells Desi "don't gaslight me" when confronting him about infidelity. Gaslight was an decade old movie by the time this scene in the movie takes place. There's no reason to believe it made any kind of cultural impact to an extent that people would using the title as a verb 10 years later (random films and actors win Academy awards every year; their movies don't regularly become verbs).

It took an absolutely massive national media propaganda campaign around presidential election and politics involving Trump, for the word gaslight to ever be injected into the popular culture zeitgeist enough for it to be used as a word by essentially anyone in the modern era - and describing a movie that almost nobody alive now has still ever watched. Still, zoomers are more likely to use it than anyone else, outside of political activists.

It stretches the limits of credulity to believe that Lucy would tell Desi that; it strikes me as an unintentional modern slang written into this movie.

Any old people here want to answer if they'd EVER heard "gaslight" be used before Trump ran for office - much less in a commonly-used manner consistent to the way someone like Lucille Ball would be saying it here?

By the way this was a good watch of a movie.. do recommend, for anyone familiar with I Love Lucy or just like Nicole Kidman or Javier Bardem; they really make the movie.

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Reading your other threads/posts on this forum, I would prefer to be an OLD person than a retard like you.

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๐Ÿคฃ two insecure insignificant losers "reading my posts".. couldn't care less

this post ๐Ÿ‘† is for someone with something useful to add. ergo, keep your greasy chubby wrinkled fingers off this one, get back to your fatwife, leechy government disability check and whining into the void about brown people - elsewhere ๐Ÿ‘‹

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Ok retard. Itโ€™s too bad your mother didn't just swallow you, like she did all the others.

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Maybe you should Google the origin of gaslight rather than ask others to do your research. I'll help. The word entered the English lexicon in 1944.

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incorrect. the number of words in american english dictionaries today is in the hundreds of thousands, most of which no one has ever heard. whereas the subset in common vernacular is a significant fraction of that. the question here is about common usage of any kind (not simply existence). no evidence yet suggests it's a been a common word ever until under the last 10 years. you yourself if you're honest i'm sure can probably admit had either never used it or heard anyone ever use before then

but if evidence exists, then it exists, i welcome its presence. and i look for a common use (as presented in this movie), not for example some random unpopular author, from a vintage book collecting dust on a bookshelf in a public library somewhere ๐Ÿ˜ถ

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Hey google, when did the word gaslighting start

1938
The term "gaslighting" was coined from the 1938 British play called Gas Light, in which a husband manipulates a wife into thinking she is crazy by slyly changing the intensity of the gas lights in their home when she is left alone. He does this in an attempt to make her believe she cannot trust herself or her memory.Feb 8, 2023

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I forgot the play preceded the move. Regardless cattantaw is argumentative (to be kind).

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Several Imdb posters where using it 16 years ago! https://moviechat.org/tt0036855/Gaslight/58c7031e4e1cf308b93447d4/the-term-gaslight

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You've already been informed that your hypothesis is false, yet you refuse to accept that fact! I don't think there's really much more to say...



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