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.

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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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