"Gate"-aholics

Having read my partner-in-blog's most recent entry, I felt it necessary to respond. I don't agree with everything he said. But first, the parts that I do agree with, so I don't get bogged down in them:

1. The suffix -gate is definitely being overused.
2. The vast majority of the media love anything that helps them sensationalise a story or make it soundbite-worthy. For example, if suspicion of the parents in the Madeleine McCann case continues to mount and they end up going on trial, I am fairly certain we'll start hearing about "Maddygate".
3. The F1 investigation Telf linked to is not worthy of being a "gate", and the moniker it has been given ("spygate") appears slapdash and badly thought out.

However, when it comes to the emergence of the -gate suffix in general, although I'm not particularly fond of it, I have no problem with it whatsoever. When used effectively (i.e. not "spygate") and not in excess, it can effectively and concisely encapsulate the general feel of a scandal by juxtaposing it with the sleaze and underhandedness of the Watergate scandal. Admittedly, most will not seem to be of as great a magnitude as Watergate, but if that had not been one of the biggest scandals of the 20th Century, if not the biggest, the -gate suffix would most likely have never come to be in the first place.

The fact that as a grammatical construction it doesn't make sense is not really an issue. If "spygate" is out then so are "telethon" and "workaholic", which take their prefixes from "marathon" and "alcoholic" respectively. The suffix -thon has nothing etymologically to do with doing something for a long time, nor does -holic (although almost always -aholic, despite the fact that the original word ends with -oholic) have its root in having an addiction to something. You could argue that these two, along with -gate, are only colloquialisms at the moment, but their widespread usage and understanding surely means that they are destined to be part of some future generation's technical terminology.

The formation of the term through laziness is also something that I take issue with; not because I disagree with that fact, but because a significant amount of words used every day in English were formed simply through laziness. Why else would we have "don't" and "can't"? If it wasn't for laziness we wouldn't be able to say "goodbye" (originally a contraction of "God be with you"), or go scuba-diving without saying we're going self-contained-underwater-breathing-apparatus-diving (possibly stretching the point a bit, but scuba is now an acceptable word and not an abbreviation). By the same token, laziness has given us the "spork" (a portmanteau of "spoon" and "fork") as an easy-to-remember name rather than inventing a completely new one. Biro and hoover, both originally brand names, are now synonyms for ball-point pen and vacuum cleaner respectively through laziness. Even "today" and "tomorrow" used to be "to-day" and "to-morrow", with the hyphen dropped simply for ease. The list goes on, and there are I'm fairly certain examples of laziness forming words back through the centuries even though most of the ones I've mentioned here are mostly from this Century and the last. Laziness is one of the key ways that English grows and changes as a language, and on the whole I embrace that, -gate's and all.

That's not to say I don't see where Telf is coming from. One of the overused suffixes of modern times I dislike is -ise - quite often exclusively -ize, as many of the versions I dislike come from American English. Two such examples are "hospitalize" (to put into hospital) and "novelize" (to turn into a novel). There's no grammatical or etymological reason I dislike these -ize's; I just find them over-sanitary and, on the whole, ugly words to use. But I accept that they are here to stay, as English has to continue developing, and will go in whichever direction it chooses whether I like it or not.

Apologies if you feel I've pissed all over your entry, Telf. That was not and is not my intention. Essentially, I agree with most of what you said about the media, but just felt a need to clarify how I feel about suffixes such as -gate and the other linguistic devices I mentioned, and show that hostility towards them is generally not necessary, but more importantly on the whole pointless. If history chooses to retain the -gate suffix there isn't a huge amount that can be done to stop it.