The US has the global market cornered on scandal suffixes

If you look at America’s greatest non-exploding export to the world over the past 50 years, sad to say, it might be the use of the scandal-inspired suffix “gate.” So we have that to be proud of.

This got on my radar because the Brits (and, it turns out, many others) have appropriated the universal code for bad behavior, born of the break-in at the Watergate hotel in 1972.

Their grand poobah, Boris Johnson — the man with the Weed Eater haircut — just survived a vote of no confidence based on what they call “Partygate.” The accusation is that Johnson’s administration was basically hammered during the length and breadth of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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I’m foggy on the details, but I get the sense that drunkenness wasn’t really the issue. After all, Britain weathered the disease no better or no worse than nations whose leadership was ostensibly sober, so take that, Temperance Society.

No, the offense in question was that everyone else in the nation was prohibited from social imbibing, while 10 Downing Street partied on. Interesting that a nation with a monarch who just celebrated 15,000 years on the throne has taken such an egalitarian turn, while we in America gave our elites special drugs and allowed them to hold political fundraisers in wine caves.

Since 1972, -gates in America have been running wild: Whitewatergate, Nannygate, Travelgate, Troopergate, Deflategate, Spygate, Bridgegate, Bountygate, Contragate, Koreagate, Russiagate, etc.

The advent of creeping gateism is attributed to the late conservative columnist William Saffire, a fussy but deliciously entertaining old coot who revered the English language as Renoir revered swans, and under normal circumstances would despise the creation of fake words.

But he wanted to rehabilitate the image of Nixon, so he began assigning -gate to a series of trivial occurrences and marginal crimes to reduce the seriousness of Watergate in the public’s eyes, ergo, the somewhat beer-sodden shenanigans of Jimmy Carter’s black sheep brother became “Billygate.”

Most gates never caught on, either because the offenses were trivial or they didn’t have a good ring to them, to wit, “Monicagate” or “Lewinskygate,” which was a worthy scandal but too cumbersome to enter the general lexicon.

After Safire’s decline, -gate designations returned to the mean, and most -gate worthy scandals either involved Texas Republicans or the New England Patriots. But the degree to which -gate has circled the world is impressive.

In Australia, a $5,000, taxpayer-funded helicopter ride to a political fundraiser became known as Choppergate; a South Korean scandal became Choi Soon-Silgate (technical point: the -gate should be affixed to an offshoot of the scandal, not the person who committed it; Nixongate would, for example have been ineffective — South Koreans just need a few more scandals for practice); a $37 billion screwup on energy auctions in India that became Coalgate, and my favorite involving the credentials of a Taiwanese politician: Dissertationgate.

Some -gates are broken down into subcategories, such as the sex scandals that gained the predictable designation of Porngate, Brothelgate, Zippergate, Strippergate, Trousergate and so on. Still further down the gender food chain are Elbowgate (Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accidentally elbowed a female MP in the chest in the House of Commons) and Ponytailgate (a waitress accused New Zealand Prime Minister John Key of pulling her hair whenever he visited her café).

The most recent -gate, near as I can tell, erupted on social media (naturally) this week when, in a discussion over strange cultural customs, the Swedes were accused of serving food to adult guests — but not their children. Out of this came Swedengate.

Oddly enough, there is, or was, some truth to the custom. A food historian told The Washington Post, “You didn’t feed other people’s children — that would have been considered a sort of intrusion in another family’s life, with the subtext of ‘You can’t feed your children properly, so I will feed them.’”

Leave it to Scandinavia to come up with Impolitegate.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Use of 'gate' in naming controversies has spread 'round the world