I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m fed up with the “-gate” meme. Lazy and generally ignorant journalists keep describing every would be scandal—no matter how trivial—as x-gate. The latest example that I’ve seen is the so called scratchgate concerning Apple iPhone 17s. Whatever the merits of this story, it’s hardly a scandal and even if it were, it doesn’t rise to the level of the actual Watergate Scandal.
A lot of the journalists who invoke and abuse this meme probably have no idea where the term comes from and those who do likely have only a vague notion of “some Nixon scandal before I was born”. Watergate—named after the office complex where the crime took place—was a serious scandal that resulted in the resignation of a president and informed American politics for a long time.
Purported scratches on an iPhone or any of the other so-called scandals ardently reported by uninformed journalists don’t rise to the same level. The overuse of this phrase brings to mind Orwell’s Politics and the English language. The theme is the same: Lazy journalists overusing trite phrases sucked dry of any meaning resulting in the debasing of the English language.
So here’s my plea. Can we please stop labeling every controversy as somethinggate. Almost none of them rise to the appropriate level and are mostly used, as Orwell suggested, to advance some political agenda.
Update : phase → phrase