There is a word used commonly these days to refer to when someone changes the facts when relating a past event to make them look better. Revisionism fits, but it isn’t the word I’m looking for. I often hear the word used when referring to Trump. I had it in my mind this morning to use in a document, but now I’ve lost it!!!
Anyone have any suggestions?
Embellish?
In my circle we call this ret-conning (retroactive continuity.) It’s a comic book term that is often used more broadly to describe putting a new spin on the past narrative to make the present one fit your desired message.
Not really…but thanks.
Yes, that is my second choice. I’ll go with that if I can’t remember the word I had in mind. Thanks!
Gaslighting?
Stranger
THAT’S IT!!! Thank you!!!
Yessss…Thank you!!!
Thank you everyone, and especially Tarataratara and Stranger. What a relief!
Gaslighting isn’t where you change the facts when relating a past event to make yourself, or the events, look better.
Gaslighting is where you claim that what’s going on is in contradiction to someone’s perceptions, for the explicit purpose of making them doubt their own perceptions.
Example: “Thanksgiving is today. It’s always on a Friday. If you celebrated it yesterday you’re doing it on the wrong day. No, this isn’t turkey, this is pork, can’t you tell?”
Yeah. Gaslighting is totally not the idea the OP is looking for.
Perceptions or memories, for past events. The point is to get you not to trust your own mind.
They can be for past events but there’s no reason to specify past events. That meat that’s on your fork right now, that’s pork. No you’re not on the second floor, we don’t have a second floor. This is the ground floor.
ETA: yes exactly, to get you not to trust your own mind
Gaslighting derives from a movie where a woman is made to think she’s crazy, in part by denying that she was seeing flickering gaslights and hearing attic noises, despite the fact that her husband was sneaking into the attic, rooting around, and causing the lights to dim when he was up there.
I definitely think revisionism isn’t the word you are looking for. That is revising the establishment version of events or their interpretation, the revised version is not necessarily more or less accurate (that depends on how accurate the “established” version of events is)
What the OP describes is being an unreliable narrator, but that’s not A word. Similarly it is a self-serving narrative.
Thanks all. The situation I am dealing with is one where a project has gone south and they are trying to cover their ass by shifting the blame to other people. They are relating events that did not happen the way they say…including telling the people they are trying to shift the blame to, that they did things that they didn’t. Telling someone that they did X when they really did Y seems like gaslighting to me.
No?
I’m glad you found the word you were looking for – it’s so frustrating when something is on the tip of your tongue like that! That said, “gaslighting” is really having a moment (the current use is biggest Ngram spike since the 1880s, when presumably it referred to the actual lighting of gas). It’s being overused these days to just mean lying, when the original connotation as depicted in the movies titled Gaslight involved deliberately trying to drive someone crazy, or make them think they were crazy, a pretty specific type of psychological abuse.
Was coming in to make this exact point. The connotative spread of “gaslighting” has been accreting rapidly over the last five to ten years or so. The trend has been to move from a specific narrow meaning to a set of more general ones.
Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss is a common meme nowadays.