[Ads-l] "Gaslight" as a verb only five decades old

Jonathan Lighter wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM
Mon Jan 9 16:11:20 UTC 2017


Check HDAS, with earlier cite from "I Love Lucy" - which probably
popularized the verb through infinite reruns.

JL

On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 10:28 AM, Yagoda, Ben <byagoda at udel.edu> wrote:

> George Cukor’s 1944 film was in turn based on a 1938 play by Patrick
> Hamilton. The OED’s first citation for “gaslight” as a  verb is a sentence
> from a 1965 article in “The Reporter”: "Some troubled persons having even
> gone so far as to charge malicious intent and premeditated ‘gaslighting.’”
>
> Ben
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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