It’s getting to be that time of year when we try to think back about what this orbit of the sun all meant. That means looking back for some. And for dictionaries, it means the word of the year. Merriam-Webster’s word of the year runner-up a decade ago was a former “Word of the Week”: malarkey. In 2012, then-Vice President Joe Biden used the charmingly old-timey term, later to be part of his primary campaign sloganeering, in his debate with Paul Ryan. 2022’s word of the year from Merriam-Webster (and another previous “Word of the Week”) is a synonym to malarkey (or at least a related concept): gaslighting. According to the American dictionary publisher, “in this age of misinformation — of ‘fake news,’ conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes — gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time. A driver of disorientation and mistrust, gaslighting is ‘the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.’”