Joyce Fegan: What the word of 2022 reveals about us
Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in a scene from the 1944 film ‘Gaslight’.
Magenta is the colour, gaslighting is the word.
This week, it emerged that Twitter would no longer be enforcing its Covid misinformation policy. It wasn’t an official announcement. There was no press release. Instead, there was a simple edit made on the social media’s website.
“Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the Covid-19 misleading information policy,” read the rules section. The change was only spotted this week, and then internationally reported.
It’s a bit like gaslighting. This week, Merriam-Webster, America’s oldest dictionary publisher announced “gaslighting” as its word of the year. That too didn’t emerge until a week later — the official announcement making international headlines.
Spend any time on social media and you’ll have seen the phrase pop up here and there, mostly in relation to personal relationships.
To really understand the phrase, looking at its origins helps — British playwright, Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, . Set in London and focusing on a middle-class marriage, the play is about the deceit that dominates the relationship.
Bella Manningham, the wife, thinks she is losing her mind. She’s convinced of it. Except, she isn’t losing her mind at all. Her husband Jack, flirts with their servants in front of her, something she is, of course, to have no issue with, and is also just in her mind. When she hears footsteps in their building, she is, of course, also just “hearing things”. And another figment of her imagination is her perception that the gas lights in her home are dimming.
Her husband Jack is physically responsible for both the footsteps and the dimming of the lights.
Survivors of domestic abuse will be well aware of such tactics, where one’s sense of reality or once certain perception of black-and-white truth is whittled away to nothing. Gaslighting is the foundation on which coercive control, the bedrock of domestic abuse, is built.
But it’s no longer victims of domestic abuse who can name gaslighting.
“In this age of misinformation — of 'fake news', conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deep fakes — gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time," Merriam-Webster said in its announcement on Monday.
We live in a world where a former US President is effectively avoiding any connection to or responsibility for the riots on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. It doesn’t seem to matter that Donald Trump, a few weeks previously, sent out a tweet that read: “Big protest in DC on January 6. Be there, will be wild!”
In the intervening years, Trump has since been banned from Twitter, and now more recently, reinstated.
Or maybe with Merriam-Webster’s announcement — it’s just an official acknowledgement that age-old political spin or corporate washing, of whatever colour, is a key fact of our lives.
Another announcement this week was the colour of the year — well what the colour of 2023 will be.
Who gets to claim the authority to call our colour is a subject for another day, but for the purpose of this article, the authority in question is Pantone — I think they make paint, they self-describe as having some kind of colour-matching system.
Either way, the colour of 2023 is magenta.
“It’s brave, it’s fearless, it depicts optimism and joy — and we know that we are all greatly in need of that,” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Colour Institute this week.
Magenta is also kind of crushed raspberry in colour, or reddish-purple, depending on your perception of colour. This year, it’s been worn by everyone from Kate Middleton to Harry Styles and Lewis Hamilton, at movie premieres, red carpets and catwalks — it helps you make a statement apparently and is a man-made invention.
In 2020, Pantone gave us “muted evening blue” as our colour of the year, and in 2021, they gave us two: “pebble grey and hazard-warning yellow”.
In such a context, perhaps we should be grateful for what we’re given.
The curious thing about the word of 2022 is that its position is not connected to one singular event. The word for 2020 was pandemic, and vaccine for 2021. No further explanation necessary.
Its editor-at-large, Peter Sokolowski, said that the seismic interest in the word was not driven by any one force, and yet searches for the term on their website spiked by 1,740% in 2022.
That’s what people, paid large amounts of money to nail trends for commercial purposes, would call the “zeitgeist”.
Unlike a 60-year-old limited liability company telling us our colour, we seem to have accidentally, universally and unconsciously self-selected our own word. It didn’t come from some event outside of our control, but instead, we seemed to have somehow collectively named a prevailing wind that’s blowing around each of our lives: the manipulation of truth.
Other most-searched words were “omicron” and “oligarch”, “queen consort” and “raid”. Had any of those words, referencing key events of 2022, from the ascension of monarchs to wars, been the word, we would have accepted them with ease, and without much questioning.
But how an arbitrary phrase, that you cannot pin the tail of any one event, became the word of 2022, is perhaps testament to the prevalence of its practice. We live in a world where a war has been described as a “situation” and been told that the incitement of violence is actually the practice of free speech, and therefore must be protected, in other words, allowed.
Let’s hope that truth is the word for 2023, and with the growth in use of the term gaslighting, maybe we’re halfway there.
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