From Watergate to... farfalle-gate

The rampantly-used media construction has come a long way since its origins in the Watergate Scandal of the Nixon Administration. Derived from the name of the building in which that genuinely scandalous affair first came to light, these days it is unsparingly applied to every minor gaffe and scrape with the potential to be spun into a furore of earth-shattering scale. In the 36 years since its coinage, the phrase has brought us such sensations as “Pizzagate” – an incident involving a wayward slice of hot ‘n’spicy and the freshly-pressed shirt of dour Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson – and more recently Fiascogate – when the flubbing of lines by rapper Lupe Fiasco at a VH1 awards ceremony rocked the hip-hop world.

Over the course of the current US election campaign, however, the American media seems to have fallen victim to some kind of mass gating contagion.

Here are my favourites:

1. Passport-gate. The revelation that three snooping State Department contractors had accessed Barack Obama’s passport file without authorisation. It later emerged that John McCain and Hillary Clinton had also been targeted.

2. NAFTA-gate. A gating boomerang. First it was reported that an Obama adviser had assured Canadian officials that his hardline rhetoric on NAFTA was for political show. Clinton immediately seized upon it as evidence that her rival was all style and no substance. Then it emerged that her advisers had done exactly the same thing.

3. Monster-gate. Samantha Power’s time as a foreign policy advisor to the Obama campaign came to an abrupt end after she let slip her frustrations with the campaign tactics of Hillary Clinton – and the word “Monster” was duly splashed across front pages the world over. 

4. Pastor-gate, aka Jeremiah-gate. Obama’s former preacher, Jeremiah Wright, was vilified for controversial comments during sermons, raising questions about his own views. But the candidate managed to slam it shut with a stirring speech on race in America.

5. Sniper-gate, aka Bosnia-gate. Hillary Clinton employed the political euphemism of the year when she attempted to explain why she had told of running from sniper fire at a Bosnian airfield when in fact she had ambled across the tarmac chatting with a schoolgirl. She “misspoke,” apparently.

6. Bowling-gate. The shocking disclosure that Barack Obama isn’t too good with a bowling ball, as discovered at a recent campaign stop. How can a man who scores an appalling 37 out of 300 hope to make a decent 3am judgment call, we wonder?

7. Bitter-gate, alternatively the snappily-named small-town-gate. Obama’s latest troubles began when he spoke of impoverished small-town Americans expressing their frustrations through “guns and religion.” Known to some as pretty-close-to-the-truth-gate.

8. Farfalle-gate. A personal favourite of mine, this one erupted after John McCain posted recipes on his campaign website supposedly from the kitchen of Cindy McCain. Then it turned out they were from the kitchen of the cable channel The Food Network.

Comments

[Daphne Kenward]

When I hear about the Rubbish that makes political headlines in America, people across the world dispair. We have a global economical crisis, we have Oil at 112 US dollars per barrel, we have a hike in food prices, we have people with no jobs, we have factories closing down, we have people losing their homes. There is a WAR in Iraq, we have the Palestinian & Isreal crisis, we have global warming, crop failures, floodings, Darfur, we have banks going bust. And the Americans are talking about Rev Wright, who is eletist, who ate the food and never paid for it. So Hillary's camp ate some food never paid the bill, and ran off without settling their accounts, they recked the place, what would you think of someone who did that, you would call them dishonest and never have them back again. Move on, deal with the real issues, if that is what America wants for President, it rings alarm bells arount the world, because that is not what you expect from a first lady. We need to hear about issues facing us all.

[Brett]

I absolutely despise the overuse of the "-gate" conjunction with every possible scandal. When it was first used, it carried connotations of serious, serious repercussions - but now it's become an idiotic idiom.

[Frank Upton]

The controversy over MPs' choices of furniture and cutlery as presents from the taxpayer has been dubbed "Dessertspoongate".

[John Chuckman, Toronto, Canada]

Americans have a great fondness for short-hand expressions.

It may reflect impatience, or mental laziness, or it may reflect a certain kind of sentimentality. Perhaps all of them.

For example, the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago is typically called "the Ike," and there are scores of such examples.

In some states, the official road signs on highways actually feature abbreviations, and they are abbreviations that may not even be meaningful to newcomers at high speeds.