Wednesday, 29 October 2008

---gate

Is anyone else getting irritated with the suffix -gate? I personally am getting tired by this lazy journalistic cliche being attached to any sort of hooha or scandal that is lighting up the news.

Currently or recently finished we have (and these are off the top of my head):-
Yacht/Depraska-gate [Mandy, Osborne & Rothschild]
Sachsgate [Brand, Ross and Manuel]
Troopergate [Sarah Palin investigation]

Of course there have been many more and this wikipedia page is testament to this fact. It is convenient and useful when defining a scandal in shorthand or for headlines but isn't it unoriginal?

I believe there is a sort of beauty in the naming of the Westland Affair, which brings to mind an elegant black and white film, or the Suez Crisis. With all of these -gates it devalues the memorability of the scandal, like a made for TV movie, each a bad sequel to what was once a seminal picture.
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1 comment:

James Smith said...

I've always enjoyed the press's obsession with the -gate suffix. It all seems very Private Eye to me: like the press is committed to keeping up this in-joke for as many years as possible.

Maybe I am unoriginal myself, but in one year at Uni, a flatmate and I made such a habbit of naming incidents "-gate" (such as Brewgate, Toenailgate etc) that we reached a point where overuse of the term was, itself, becoming scandalous. "Gategate" was the logical nadir.

8/11/08 11:02 pm

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