Remember when no one ever thought about adding the suffix “-gate” to a word to indicate a scandal? Now there’s Troopergate, Travelgate, Monicagate, Cameragate, Sandwichgate, and of course, the mother of all gates, Watergate. Grant talks about the flood of “-gate” words inspired by that scandal from the 1970s. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Scandalgate”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Maria from Indianapolis, Indiana.
Well, what’s on your mind, Maria?
Well, there’s a phenomenon I’ve been noticing recently in the news, and that is adding the suffix of gate to anything relating to a scandal. And it drives me crazy. The most recent one I saw was lipstick gate, which was a reference to Barack Obama putting lipstick on a pig when he was referencing a comment that he made. And I’m pretty sure the origins are from the Watergate scandal, which obviously took place at the Watergate Hotel.
Right. I want to know why it’s so common now, you know, 30 years later, to use it in relation to everything.
Well, let me ask you a question. What would you say if I told you that it’s not a recent phenomenon and it practically sensed the day that the five men were arrested for breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Convention? Has been a suffix that has been attached to other words to indicate a scandal?
I would be surprised because I’ve only noticed it in the past five years or so.
Oh, really? Imagine the Clinton impeachment plus the O.J. Simpson trial, the first one, and the two wars in Iraq all combined. That’s how significant Watergate was at the time in terms of news coverage and the way it penetrated absolutely everything. They talked about it on the television comedy shows. There were references to it in movies. There were references to it in the sitcoms, in the newspapers. For years, you could not escape this term Watergate. So it’s no wonder that some form of that word stuck around in that way.
Now it seems like it’s attached to the most minor of scandals, not just the big names.
That’s a very good point. And that happens to a lot of words that start out to be rather severe. They usually become ameliorated over time and to be a little softer. One of my favorite examples of this was, I believe it was called Sandwich Gate, which was used in Philadelphia because apparently the vendor who had the permit to sell food there at the stadium wasn’t going to carry Philly cheesesteaks or something. And so the local newspapers were calling it Sandwich Gate. It was something ridiculous like that. But yeah, there are thousands of these gate coinages. And not only that, this gate suffix has showed up in other languages.
Oh, really? That’s wild. It showed up in Germany and Greece and Hungary and a few other places. It’s also in the rest of the Anglophone world. You can use it in the UK and Australia, and it doesn’t require explanation. That’s how deeply it’s penetrated into English.
Well, I hope that’s helped. So we’ve kind of just, to summarize, we’ve kind of just explained that these gate words have been coined all along for the past 30-plus years, and gate as a suffix to mean scandal is so entrenched in English that it’s probably not going to go away.
Okay. Well, I’ll listen to it and know that it’s not just a recent phenomenon now.
No, not at all.
All right. Well, glad to help you, Maria.
All right. Thank you very much.
Thanks for calling.
Bye-bye.
Okay. Bye-bye.
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