The War On…Suffix Abuse

The War On… series, a new column exposing contrived media idiocies

Modern media schlubs are becoming increasingly hooked on reducing big ideas down to brainless byte-sized bits of ‘eye candy’, as the Fourth Estate is forced to squeeze headlines into html-bound boxes on a monitor screen or mobile phone.  On any given day on The Guardian’s website, you’ll see such puny puns as Apocalypse Ow! for a story on pain relief or Strictly Come Mincing, for a lifestyle piece on uses for lean mince (tsk – whatever were you thinking?!) in these freshly-depressed times.  Whatever it takes to hook you in to where the Google Ads lurk in lurid incongruity with the article you’ve chosen.

This harks back to a media obsession with squashing those monstrous stories into a single defining word or phrase, in much the same way advertisers do with their slogans.  Eventually, after the kind of lexical pulling and probing that would make even hardened neo-cons wince, good English usage is renditioned quite extraordinarily out of sight, and along comes a -gate.

“-gate” has become modern media shorthand for A Titillating and/or Political Scandal That Occupies The Media Ooze For (Roughly) Five Days In A Row And Is Suggestive Of (Crikey!) A Cover-up.

The progenitor or gateway -gate was Watergate, a scandal of such dizzying dimensions that the only way anyone could get a handle on it was to tag on the humdrum image of a hinged wooden barrier allowing ingress and egress down garden paths.  Actually, -Gate Zero merely happened to be attached to the noun Water, forming the compound noun nomenclature of an office complex.

Little did this humble four-letter noun know that, thanks to 24-hour rolling churnalism, it would be appropriated in the Nineties and Noughties by churnalists to summarise any dribble of news that has occupied the media’s inexorable gaze for five successive days.

The next big -gate was Irangate, a trans-global -gate and able to compete with the presidential proportions of the original.  Monicagate came in the Nineties to haunt Big Willy Style’s presidency.  Media savants at the time had been tempted to call the whole shebang “circumbendibusgate”.

This year alone, we have suffered a wearying profligacy of -gates:  Maxgate and Sachsgate, also dubbed Manuelgate.  Sarah ‘Palinator’ Palin, the wildcard Republican candidate for the US Vice-presidency, earned herself a couple of insta-gates when she Hindenberged herself into infamy with her Alaskan brand of downhome brunette bimboism.  Lipstickgate and Troopergate were new lows for the -gate, and at one point, lawyers representing -gates everywhere were close to filing writs for defamation to end these willy-nilly -gate constructions once and for all.

With the Microsoft Antitrust lawsuits being filed by the EU, there was a golden opportunity for a “Gatesgate”.  Sadly, the news came and went and “Gatesgate” went unused.  It now resides in an orphanage for abandoned -gates in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear.

One wonders whether all these lexical abuses would have occurred if that office complex in Washington had been called Waterystool.

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