Comment on Do you ever worry that you're secretly a psychopath that unknowingly manipulates people around you?
whotookkarl@lemmy.world 8 months agoFrom the wiki article describing the play/movie the phrase comes from:
“In the story, the husband secretly dims and brightens the indoor gas-powered lighting but insists his wife is imagining it, making her think she is going insane.”
Imo it’s when someone is deceived by a person who lies about the actual state of affairs/reality to make the other person question what they experienced as credible. I don’t think that’s the same as when someone helps question beliefs in general because skepticism is good to make sure we aren’t self deluding, but if that person is lying about reality to manipulate them it becomes bad/gaslighting.
Another example I think is from it’s always sunny in Philadelphia in the episode where Dennis and Mac go to live in the suburbs and Mac asks Dennis if he hears a beeping the audience can hear and Dennis says he can’t until he blows up saying of course he can when berating Mac. Dennis is angry at Mac and in retaliation he gaslights him about the annoying beeping sound to manipulate him into questioning if the beeping is real or an audio hallucination.
RidcullyTheBrown@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Hey, thanks for taking the time to reply to my hasty, poorly put together message. The point I was trying to make was that the original meaning has been lost when the word became popular. It is a somewhat obscure word with a loose definition based on an obscure reference and it describes something for which the language was more than ready to describe anyway. I think that instead of telling people to try and use the word correctly, one should tell then to not use it at all.