# Twists that everyone knows **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 11, 2020, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830 "2020-12-11T13:51:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2020, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/121 "2020-12-14T02:01:35Z")
Maltese Falcon. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2020, 2:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/122 "2020-12-14T02:04:17Z")
OK, so then I’m surprised you don’t know **Gaslight**. I recommend when you get a chance, watch this movie. It is a little slow by today’s standards, but so well done and acted. Oh, bonus, look for a young Angela Lansbury in what I think was her first movie. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2020, 2:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/123 "2020-12-14T02:04:50Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > Helped to change my opinion about Nicole Kidman’s acting in fact. Well, then I should see it. I can’t stand her… I see a lot of movies, and I’ve never heard of The Others. Is it worth finding? ---
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2020, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/124 "2020-12-14T02:08:02Z")
It was pretty good. But it wasn’t a big movie. Kind of a slower paced _horror_ movie. Felt like a throwback actually to the well done horror movies of the 50s or 60s. I went from thinking Kidman wasn’t much of an actress, to realizing that she is an actress that often got crappy roles. She’s excellent in The Others. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2020, 2:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/125 "2020-12-14T02:59:37Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > > [@RealityChuck](#): > > > > June 6, 1941? > > June??? That scans. I got the impression that it was covering a non-short interval. ---
**Author:** ![peccavi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peccavi/32/388_2.png) [@peccavi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/peccavi)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2020, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/126 "2020-12-14T04:17:22Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > > [@RealityChuck](#): > > > > June 6, 1941? > > June??? Forget it, he’s rollin’ ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2020, 8:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/127 "2020-12-14T08:26:25Z")
_Gaslight_ was Angela Lansbury’s first movie. She was 17 when it began filming, but she turned 18 during filming. In 1944, there was already a lot of laws in place regarding protection of child performers, and one had to do with a social worker being on the set any time a minor was involved. There is a scene at one point where Lansbury lights up a cigarette, and the social worker would not let 17-yr-old Lansbury do this. They had to put off filming this scene until after her 18th birthday. She is great in the role-- perfect, as a matter of fact. She must have blown away all the competition in the audition, though, to have made MGM decide that they wanted her enough to put up with the child labor laws at the preliminaries, and the beginning of filming. BTW: Looked up images of the 1-sheet for _Gaslight_, and for the Bergman-Boyer MGM film, it is one word. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2020, 8:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/128 "2020-12-14T08:59:28Z")
> [@What\_Exit](#): > > OK, so then I’m surprised you don’t know **Gaslight**. I recommend when you get a chance, watch this movie. It is a little slow by today’s standards, but so well done and acted. I love old movies, and have since I was a kid-- like nine or ten, and I don’t consider them slow. _Gaslight_, in particular, is very, very suspenseful; change the timing to pack in more action, and you reduce the tension, which would ruin the movie. It’s probably true that more action movies are made today than once were, so on average, the pacing of films has picked up, but if you look only at suspense films that are fairly compared to _Gaslight_, they having similar pacing. They may have a few “jack-in-the-box” moments, where something jumps out at you, which spikes the tension, and then momentarily relieves it, instead of keeping it at a steady climb, but that has as much to do with the availability of FX techniques as anything. I actually recently (well, really almost a year ago) had a conversation like this with my brother, who works in the film industry. He was a CGI tech for about 15 year. His first job was doing FX for the shows _Xena_ & _Hercules_, and he also worked on _Avatar_; he didn’t work on _Titanic_ itself, but he was an editor on the documentary about the making of _Titanic_, and became good friends with James Cameron, which led to the job on _Avatar_. Recently, has has been trying to break into screenwriting. He has some script editing and “additional dialogue” credits, and wrote one stage play that was moderately successful, but then was adapted into a graphic novel which has been really very successful so far-- it’s been out only a couple of months, and is about to hit the break-even mark, at which point instead of his modest royalties, he will start getting a percentage based on his investment (and so will I!) Sorry for the hijack-- I’m just very proud of him. Also, gives his bona fides regarding suspense films. I’m trying to think of a very recent film that was suspenseful, and not action-packed, with a _Gaslight_-like pace. Unfortunately, I have seen few films since my son was born. However, I can think of _The Blair Witch Project_ from 1999, 21 years old, yes, but considerably older than _Gaslight_ in 1944, very slow-paced, and very, very suspenseful. @What_Exit On the whole, though, I agree with you regarding _Gaslight_. Superb acting-- Bergman’s “because I am mad” speech is brilliant: [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/UVtrTqH5G88/hqdefault.jpg "because i am mad, i hate you") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVtrTqH5G88) And, of course, directed by George Cukor. ---
**Author:** ![Joey\_P](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/919ad9/32.png) [@Joey\_P](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Joey_P)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2020, 1:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/129 "2020-12-14T13:18:24Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > I love old movies, and have since I was a kid-- like nine or ten, and I don’t consider them slow. _Gaslight_ , in particular, is very, very suspenseful; change the timing to pack in more action, and you reduce the tension, which would ruin the movie. I think old movies aren’t slow as long as you’re not comparing them to today’s movies. I love old movies as well and one reason for that is, the further you go back, the more the movie has to rely on storytelling instead of special effects. So, sure, they’re slower in the sense that they have less going on visually, but they’re often much denser stories. I have a friend that will write off any movie filmed in black and white. If it’s not in color it’s ‘boring’. To a certain degree, I can understand that if you were born in the 90’s and raised on Matrix and Fast and the Furious movie franchises, you not going to get a real big thrill out of Rear Window. In fact, I finally got him to watch Twin Peaks and I think he hated every minute of it. No amount of explaining could get him to understand that Twin Peaks was the Dexter of the 90’s (Dexter being the big show at the time he was watching Twin Peaks). > [@RivkahChaya](#): > > I’m trying to think of a very recent film that was suspenseful, and not action-packed, with a _Gaslight_ -like pace. Try [The Following](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Following). It’s Christopher Nolan’s First film. I got lucky and actually found it on Netflix and watched it before Momento got released, or at least before it became super popular and Christopher Nolan became a household name. It’s a still a thriller and there’s some action, but it’s very much a slow burn. ---
**Author:** ![Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slow_moving_vehicle/32/291_2.png) [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slow_Moving_Vehicle)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2020, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/130 "2020-12-14T17:26:32Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > I think the past tense should be “gaslighted.” I know that the past tense of “light” is “lit,” but the word being used as a verb here, was originally a noun, a compound noun of gas + light. If you were to take the noun “light” and use it as a verb to mean something like pelting someone with lightbulbs, you wouldn’t use the irregular past tense that the verb form takes-- you say you “lighted” the person, if for some reason you needed a creative verb, and didn’t just want to say you “threw lights at him.” > > So “gaslight,” as a verb should be regular. > > I’m trying to think of another example of this, but it’s too damn late, and I have to be up in three hours, and I’ve only slept 90 minutes tonight, so far _Fly out_, in the baseball sense of “a ball hit in the air”. When a batter hits one to an outfielder, she is said to have _flied out_, not _flown out_ or _flew out_. Stephen Pinker used this as an example in _The Language Instinct_. IIRC, he said that the original verb _fly_ has the irregular past tense _flew_, but, the verb _fly_ in the baseball meaning comes from the noun _fly_ (which comes from the original verb). And this chain of transmission somehow enforces regularity on the past tense of the baseball verb. Thus _fly, flew, flown_ - v., to travel through the air =\> _fly, flies_ - n., a baseball hit into the air =\> _fly, flied_ - v., to hit a baseball into the air. I may be misremembering some of this, but the upshot is that yes, I think the past tense of _gaslight_ is _gaslighted._ ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2020, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/131 "2020-12-14T17:28:52Z")
> [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](#): > > I may be misremembering some of this, but the upshot is that yes, I think the past tense of _gaslight_ is _gaslighted._ Wow. Thank you! ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2020, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/132 "2020-12-14T17:37:12Z")
Missed the edit window, but I just thought of something interesting, and I looked it up in a couple iof sources just to check: when “alight” meant to light a candle (or something), the past tense is “alit,” but when it means to exit a vehicle, the past tense is “alighted.” I don’t know the etymology of “alight” in disembarking, but it’s an unrelated word, a connotative meaning, or derived from a noun form, I assume. I can’t think of what else it could be. In any case, it loses its irregularity. ---
**Author:** ![Saint\_Cad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saint_cad/32/18907_2.png) [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)\ **Post date:** [December 14, 2020, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/133 "2020-12-14T18:02:57Z")
> [@peccavi](#): > > Forget it, he’s rollin’ Golf clap ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2020, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/134 "2020-12-15T01:28:01Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > I don’t know the etymology of “alight” in disembarking A bird alights on a branch. This would be the end of its flying, for the moment. Hence, in a conveyance, one is traveling, and ending that travel by exiting the conveyance is alighting. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2020, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/135 "2020-12-15T03:00:57Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > I don’t know the etymology of “alight” in disembarking, [etymology online](https://www.etymonline.com/word/alight) says it’s from the sense of lightening the load on a horse or a vehicle by descending from it. > [@](#): > > “to descend (from horseback, etc.), dismount,” Old English alihtan “alight,” originally “to lighten, take off, take away,” from a- “down, aside” (see [a-](https://www.etymonline.com/word/a-?ref=etymonline_crossreference#etymonline_v_3) (1)) + lihtan “get off, make light” (see [light](https://www.etymonline.com/word/light?ref=etymonline_crossreference) (v.)). The notion is of getting down off a horse or vehicle, thus lightening it. Of aircraft (originally balloons) from 1786. Related: Alighted; alighting. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2020, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/136 "2020-12-15T03:18:33Z")
So “alight” to get off, and “alight” to be kindled, are different words, with different etymologies, which is why one if regular, and one is irregular-- albeit, I guess “alight” is in strict sense, and adjective, but there’s a verbal back-formation. ---
**Author:** ![tripthicket](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripthicket/32/297_2.png) [@tripthicket](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tripthicket)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2020, 9:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830/137 "2020-12-15T09:19:45Z")
Not to be all anecdotal, but my inner teenager still fondly remembers Weaver’s shucking out of her jumpsuit (?) down to her undershirt and panties. Which only illustrates that many men never really mature as they age. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twists-that-everyone-knows/927830.md?page=6)