[Ads-l] Facebookery: "Sally refuses to be _gaslit_."

[Dan Goncharoff]

Wouldn't the word "gaslit" be familiar in the sense of "lit by gas", and
wouldn't the Academy Award nominated movie and it's context be familiar to
just about everyone?

I don't think the connection is hard to make.

On Jan 13, 2017 11:49 AM, "ADSGarson O'Toole" <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Ben Zimmer wrote:
> > It's remarkable that "gaslighting" was considered common enough
> > knowledge by then that it didn't require an explanation tying it back
> > to the movie, and it's equally remarkable that the verb had already
> > taken on the irregular morphology of "gaslit" for the past tense /
> > past participle.
>
> Great citation, Ben.
>
> Maybe the term was familiar to movie and television screenplay writers
> because it facilitated convenient shorthand descriptions when
> discussing plot mechanics. The writers may have misjudged the
> popularity/frequency of "to gaslight" in the general populace. Perhaps
> "to gaslight" was largely unknown to people similar to the characters
> in "Gomer Pyle, USMC" before it appeared on television.
>
> Garson
>
> >
> > On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 8:15 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I prefer _gaslighted_, but...
> >>
> >> Youneverknow.
> >>
> >> I grew up in the home of the Laclede Gas-Light Company, so...
> >>
> >>
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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