As languages go, English is extraordinarily capacious. Thanks to its global history and openness to innovation, English welcomes a million or more words. By comparison, French lists fewer than half that figure. And Spanish, less than a tenth. English grew by conquest, commerce, and creative coinage.
Colonization appropriated some familiar vocabulary. Thus, shenanigans, hooligan, and galore—from “’til plenty” in old Irish.
Curry, musk, and mongoose come from imperial India. The same goes for the borrowed words bangle, catamaran, and dungarees. A bandana, a cowboy fashion item, traces its origin to the Hindi verb “to tie.”
Close to home, powwow, caucus, and chipmunk come to us from the Objibwean, Narragansett, and Algonquian languages.
Commerce, too, gave us new words. British dockworkers mispronounced the durable blue fabric, denim, as they unloaded crates marked “de Nîmes” that had been shipped from the textile center in France.
One Million Words Is Not Enough
Even an omnivorously large lexicon, such as English boasts, proves insufficient as creative speakers and writers continually grow hungry for new words. The sources are varied.
Fiction delivers new words. In her Harry Potter series, for example, J.K. Rowling coined a large, specialized lingo for the magical society whose inhabitants lived alongside us clueless non-magical muggles. (You can now find muggle in the Oxford English Dictionary.) Rowling’s neologisms often derive from Latin. An Animagus, a shapeshifter, is a portmanteau of the Latin words for animal and wizard. (A werewolf is an Animagus, don’t you know.) Wizards in training attend Hogwarts school, another compound word. The magical jocks who play Quidditch face a team from a rival all-girl French school, Beauxbatons, “beautiful sticks.” The Hogwarts men found them enchanting, literally.
Slurves, Swishes, and Hail Marys
Sports yields a treasure trove of invented words and phrases. In baseball, a slurve is a slider that curves. A spitball, its aerodynamics altered with a pitcher’s saliva, follows an unpredictable trajectory that bewilders batters. When a fastball arrives high and inside, sportscasters wryly describe the pitch as chin music.
When a basketball shot doesn’t even touch the rim, it’s called a swish. And in American football, a desperate quarterback may arc a long bomb into the endzone. Because the pass is easily picked off and has barely a prayer of scoring, it’s called a Hail Mary.
The Colors of Deception: White, Blue, Pink, and Green
Whitewashing, an old word picture that describes using watered-down, chalky paint to brighten up weathered wooden fences, came to mean covering up embarrassment. The fix doesn’t hold for long. A slew of inventive new words employs the “wash” suffix to describe deceptive spin.
Bluewashing, for example, refers to an advertising strategy that touts corporate virtue misleadingly. When a sports footwear company raised its corporate voice against police brutality and racism in the U.S., critics charged that forced labor produced its sneakers in China. Aha, a shameless bluewashing ploy!
Sportswashing describes the tactic of authoritarian governments to spruce up their dubious humanitarian records by acquiring popular athletic teams and sports leagues. How can a country be bad when it owns Newcastle United? And when a hapless toy company reissued sets of army men and tanks in pink to “increase play value” (I am not making this up), they were said to be “pinkwashing.” When companies plant disguised news stories favorable to their interests, it’s called pink sliming—named after raw processed hamburger meat.
Then There Is Greenwashing
Then, there is greenwashing, which is both more insidious and more consequential. Greenwashing in one famous instance happened to turn on another neologism that used “gate” as a suffix. After the Watergate Scandal that prompted Richard Nixon’s resignation, journalists described other scandals, some silly, similarly.
These included nipplegate after Janet Jackson’s Superbowl halftime wardrobe malfunction; hackergate after Rupert Murdock’s newspapers invaded the royal family’s privacy; and Monicagate, after a President’s notorious misbehavior with an intern. The German car company, VW, engaged in criminal greenwashing during its Dieselgate scandal. Their engineers had rigged monitoring software to make it seem that their diesel-burning engines could pass emissions tests.
Gaslighting: A Word of the Year
Mirriam-Webster declared gaslighting, another neologism, the “word of the year” in 2022. When late in the 2024 Presidential campaign, Donald Trump minimized the deadly insurrection at the United States Capitol as a “love fest,” Kamala Harris called his word choice “gaslighting.”
However current the word, the devious, manipulative, destructive practice is ancient. In a treatment regarded as comic in the Elizabethan Age, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, set in patriarchal Padua, featured Petruchio, an amiable schemer and fortune-hunter, and his target, Katherine. Petruchio relentlessly contradicts and confuses his headstrong young intended until she is made to submit meekly to marriage. Late 16th-century audiences breathed a sigh of relief when gender order was restored.
The modern term gaslighting derives from the 1938 stage melodrama Gas Light and its unsettling 1944 screen adaptation. In this thriller, Charles Boyer plays a sociopathic charmer who undermines Ingrid Bergman’s stability by compulsive degrees, seeking to convince his wife that she is losing her mind. He hopes he can find and steal her jewelry, a legacy that she treasures. The title has since become a denominalized verb signifying coercion in relationships.
The 1944 film’s title became a denominalized verb for a prolonged coercive psychological attack.
Source: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain
Other classic films recruit gaslighting as a plot driver. Think of the creepy Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), the creepier Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and my favorite nail-biter, Vertigo (1955), Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece about a San Francisco police detective, the emotionally drained victim of an elaborate gaslighting plot.
In Real Life
Gaslighting is not just a mainstay of film and fiction. In real life, in recent years, gaslighting has seized both popular understanding and attention in clinical theory.
Gaslighting consistently ranks in the top five most popular topics in the Psychology Today blogosphere as readers and clinicians trace how, in both personal and professional settings, cunning gaslighters exert psychological control as they undermine their victim’s confidence and cloud their judgment.
Skilled and persistent gaslighters, most often domestic abusers, but sometimes familiar actors on a broader social or political stage—cult leaders and narcissistic dictators and would-be dictators— convince their victims of their vulnerability while promising deliverance from evil.
The film ends satisfyingly with a heroic rescue as Joseph Cotton uncloaks the gaslighter and Ingrid Bergman comes to her senses. But in real life, healing from a concerted gaslighting attack takes time, and repair often requires professional help.
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Publish date : 2024-10-18 17:09:27
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The post Playing With Gaslighting and Other Newly Minted Words first appeared on Africa-News.
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Publish date : 2024-10-19 07:23:33
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