The term “gaslighting” has become popular on social media. “To gaslight” means — or at least once meant — to manipulate people to make them think they’re insane. Today the word often serves as an all-purpose tool for attacking someone who says you’re wrong.
A Time article discusses the stretching of several psychological terms, including gaslighting:
Perhaps the most often misconstrued word of the past few years, “gaslighting” has been widely adopted as a way to describe any act that’s insensitive, a lie, or simply a difference of opinion.
A few months ago, an office at the University of Southern California declared that the word “field” is racist. They “explained” this absurdity as follows:
This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language,” the memo reads. “Language can be powerful, and phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.”
That is, many slaves have worked in fields, therefore the word “field” is racist. But as Metatron has pointed out on YouTube, slaves have been made to work in houses, so the word “house” must be racist by the same standard. Self-appointed or university-appointed arbiters of language have similarly declared other words, such as “master,” racist. The Firefox browser, which I’m using to write this, now has a “primary password,” “formerly known as master password.”
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This post is inspired by an online discussion of how the word “Orwellian” should be used. One person argued it should refer only to authoritarian dictatorships. I disagreed. That got me thinking of other words based on authors’ names, such as “Kafkaesque,” “Machiavellian,” and “Dickensian.” How broadly or narrowly should we use those words? Is there any basis for agreement?
The subject here is words that are reminiscent of something in the author’s work. Adjectives that denote the author’s ideas directly, such as “Jeffersonian,” “Marxist,” and “Freudian” are easier to deal with; they should refer to something the author has said, or they’re being used incorrectly. But words that indicate reminiscences are trickier. Any writer worth becoming an adjective writes about more than one thing and approaches them from more than one angle.
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A conspiracy theory, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators.” Alternatively, it’s “a theory asserting that a secret of great importance is being kept from the public”; the idea presumably is that insiders have conspired to keep the truth hidden.
Dictionary.com takes a similar approach: “a theory that rejects the standard explanation for an event and instead credits a covert group or organization with carrying out a secret plot” or “a belief that a particular unexplained event was caused by such a covert group.” In all these cases, a conspiracy theory requires a conspiracy to make something happen or to keep something hidden. The cabal has to be hidden and the conspirators powerful; an accusation that some people got together to plan a crime doesn’t count as a conspiracy theory unless the perpetrators are extremely rich or powerful.
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