WTN: greenlighted, greenlit, gaslighted, gaslit
James Harbeck
greenlighted, greenlit, gaslighted, gaslit
I’ll launch today’s word tasting with the following exchange:
“I thought they greenlighted the project?”
“Nah, the dude gaslit me.”
Wait, no… maybe it’s this:
“I though they greenlit the project?”
“Nah, the dude gaslighted me.”
Ah, come on, I need someone to give the official go-ahead on one of these. Right now I’m questioning my sense of reality.
You see the issue, right? If you’re not sure which to use – gaslighted or gaslit, greenlighted or greenlit – dictionaries tend to list both, and Google’s Ngrams show both options as current for each one.
So why is it an issue in the first place?
The verb light is irregular; its past tense is lit. Some people will say, on that basis, that the past tenses of greenlight and gaslight are naturally greenlit and gaslit. But the issue is that we’re not really dealing with the past tense of the verb light here.
Let’s say – by way of a parallel example – that you see a fellow in fancy dress, bespectacled, bowtied, top-hatted, and smug-faced. We can accept that bespectacled is past tense of bespectacle, ‘put spectacles on [someone]’. But bowtied? Top-hatted? Smug-faced? All three of those are using the adjective-forming function of -ed. You can add -edto a noun to make an adjective. Top-hatted means wearing a top hat. If you object that you can say “I’ll top-hat him” meaning to put a top hat on him, consider the others: smug-faced doesn’t mean ‘faced smugly’; bowtied doesn’t mean ‘tied in a bow’. Both use the ‘having or wearing or otherwise associated with the noun modified’ sense of -ed. And likewise with greenlighted and gaslighted.
However, if a project has been greenlighted, as in given a green light, you might say that metaphorically green light is shining on it. So it is lit green. So it is greenlit. And while that is not the origin of the construct, I can’t object to the reconstrual.
But gaslighted is less ambiguous. You know where the term comes from, right? It’s from the 1944 American movie Gaslight, which was based on the 1940 British movie Gaslight, which was based on the 1938 play Gas Light. In the play and movies, a man does things to cause his wife to question her sanity, including telling her it’s just her imagination that the gas lights in the house are dimming at certain times (which they actually are, because he is turning on other gas lights – but I won’t give away any more).
So deliberately doing things to make a person question their grip on reality is named gaslighting after the movie. And that is a verb: you gaslight someone. But when you gaslight someone, you are not lighting them with gas. This is not a modified form of the verb light; it is a verb formed from a noun, and in such cases, as a rule, the word gets regularized. To give a parallel example, if you butterfly a pork chop, you do not say “I have butterflown the pork chop” or “I butterflew the pork chop yesterday.”
Yes, of course butterfly the verb is named after butterfly the insect, which is formed from butter plus fly noun, not fly verb, but that’s exactly the point: fly the insect is named from fly the verb that it does; light the object is named from light the verb that it does. Butterfly is named as a kind of fly (yes, yes, it’s really a different genus, but nonetheless); gas light is a kind of light. And butterfly the action is named after something associated with the butterfly (its shape), while gaslight the action is named after something associated with gas light (the play and movie). So it’s parallel.
And yet. Few people would ever say “I butterflew the pork chop” (except to be funny), but many people will say “She gaslit me.”
There are a couple of reasons I can discern for this.
For one thing, gaslit does have literal use: something that is lit with a gas flame is gaslit. In the Google Ngram, if you check the hits for gaslit, you will find quite a few literal ones. So that establishes a precedent that doesn’t exist for butterflew.
And for another, it’s just not all that jarring. Especially if you haven’t seen the movie and don’t know the details of the reference, it quite plausibly might seem to refer to lighting someone with gas; and even if you have seen the movie, the scenes are gaslit, so… Common usage can tolerate the reanalysis, which also is, ironically, a kind of regularization – because the verb is known to follow an established vowel gradation pattern, and so lit is just expected.
Either way, whichever form seems natural or correct to you, there is the presence of the other one, used quite commonly in a way that might well make you question your grip on reality. But at least no one is intentionally gaslighting you with it.
And, hey, language evolves in many ways, one of which is reanalysis, and another (overlapping) one of which is alteration by analogy. So whichever of each you want to use, I’d be happy to greenlight it… but it’s not up to me anyway.
Please send comments, replies, and suggestions for words to taste to me to ja...@harbeck.ca.
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