This is Origins in Five. Five minutes, one word, a small story to start the day. Today's word is ghastly. First off, I want to acknowledge that this word was suggested by a loyal listener. Please feel free to email the show and suggest words that you would like to learn about. In the meantime, we can thank Maddie for suggesting such an interesting word. Second, we are coming close to the end of season one, only two more weeks left. Then we'll be taking the summer off and returning in the fall. Now on to our word. If someone accuses you of gaslighting them, they mean you are making them question their own reality. While the word has many definitions, Merriam Webster says that gaslighting is the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for one's own advantage. If that is not harsh enough, the American Psychological Association notes that gaslighting once referred to the manipulation so extreme as to induce mental illness or to justify commitment of the gaslighted person to a psychiatric institution. Of course, now the word is used to refer to manipulation in a general sense. And in that more general usage, the word has become extremely popular as of late. It shows up everywhere, in relationships, in politics, in the workplace. It has become so widely used that it was named Merriam Webster's Word of the Year in 2022, reflecting just how deeply it had worked its way into society. So where did the word come from? Well I'll tell you where it didn't come from. It did not come from our usual places, so no ancient Rome, Greece, France, or England. In fact, the word was first used on stage in the twentieth century. In 1938, a British playwright named Patrick Hamilton wrote a thriller called Gaslight. The story centers on a couple living in London in the later half of the nineteenth century. This play was later made into a movie in England in 1940 and then the United States in 1944. The 1944 US movie was called Gaslight and it starred Ingrid Bergman as the wife. Although there are a few differences between the movie and the play, the plot is basically the same. The husband, whose name is Jack Manningham, was secretly trying to drive his wife to madness so that she would be put in a mental institution. He thought that if she were in a mental institution, he would be able to steal hidden jewels that were located in a vacant apartment above his own. His method is chillingly subtle. He sneaks up to the apartment above their own almost every night to search for the hidden jewels. As he does so, he lights the gas lamps in that apartment. And when he does that it causes the lights throughout the rest of the building, including his own apartment, to dim. When his wife notices this, Jack tells her she's imagining it. But that isn't all. He hides her possessions and accuses her of stealing or misplacing other items, all in an effort to make her believe that she's losing her mind. Over time the wife begins to believe him. Although she notices the lights flickering and dimming, she trusts her husband. And when he says she's imagining the dimming of the gaslight and that nothing is changing, she goes along with it. She starts to doubt her own senses, her own mind. Now this play was a sensation, and the nineteen forty four film, the US film, brought the story to millions of people, and the image of those flickering and dipping gaslights being used as a tool of psychological manipulation lodged itself into the imagination of a lot of people. By the 1960s and 1970s, psychologists began using the term gaslighting to describe a specific pattern of emotional abuse, where one person systematically causes another to question their own perception of reality. The term moved from theater into therapy and eventually into everyday conversation. Gaslighting started off as such an innocuous word. It merely described the specific mechanics of turning on a Victorian gas lamp. But one play and the subsequent usage turned such a harmless word into one of the most insidious forms of psychological manipulation we know. And that's Origins in Five. One word, one story to start your day.