“Gate” Crashing

This is gonna be a bit of a rant. Please forgive me if you stopped by to find something uplifting or relevant to writing.

OK, so…what’s up with using “-gate” as a suffix for every freaking scandal out there? Come on, can’t we be more original?

I understand the Watergate scandal in the ’70’s was important and shocking to the nation, but that was 40 years ago! Let it die already.

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I’m getting a bit tired of hearing almost any scandal called something with “-gate” added to the end of it. Consider:

Bounty-gate

Spy-gate

Bridge-gate

Celeb-gate

Donut-gate

Email-gate

Iran-gate

Deflate-gate

And countless others. In fact, there’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to this phenomenon listing countless other scandals.

Can we just band together and stop this madness? I mean come on, how many people do we have on this planet and the best term we can use to indicate a scandal is the last part of a hotel name? We’re better than that.

Why not “Bounty Scandal” or “Bridge Scandal” or maybe some other clever riff on the immediate scandal? The media drops a “-gate” at the end of some word and it’s automatically a scandalous event?

I’m here to spread the movement: let’s crash the gate! Let’s work on educating ourselves on how to properly describe current events.

Ok, I’m done with this rant-gate. Thanks for stopping by.