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-gate (W3)

• 1972 Watergate
• 2000 Telekomgate
• 2005 Rootkitgate
• 2006 Reutersgate
• 2006 AOL-Gate
• 2006 Hackgate
• 2010 Antennagate
• 2010 Cablegate
• 2010 Webcamgate
• 2011 SATAgate
• 2011 Akkugate
• 2012 Bentgate
• 2013 Donglegate

-gate

suffix attached to any word to indicate "scandal involving", 1973, abstracted from "Watergate", the Washington, D.C., building complex, home of the National Headquarters of the Democratic Party when it was burglarized June 17, 1972, by operatives later found to be working for the staff and re-election campaign of U.S. President Richard Nixon.

Notes on a Suffix for "Scandal"

"Watergate", "Gamergate", "Bendgate": The abundance of "-gates" annoys some grammarians, but its versatility shows language at its most dynamic.

Gabriel Arana

Nov 3, 2014

In politics, it takes little to turn a minor dust-up into a scandal. And thanks to the Nixon administration, American English now has a handy little suffix at the ready for the muckrakers: "-gate".

Chris Christie’s "Bridgegate". Apple’s "Bendgate". And most recently, "Ebola-gate" and "GamerGate".

This addition to English’s vernacular has miffed some grammar snobs, but this phenomenon is language in action. Contrary to what purists may say, language is not static; the brain is constantly analyzing the linguistic world—categorizing it, refining and redefining the rules. The emergence of the suffix "-gate" is just one example of this singularly human capacity at work.

The "-gate" suffix is brought to you courtesy of the "Watergate" scandal that toppled the presidency of Richard Nixon. A complex of five buildings in Washington, D.C.’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood (and now, the home of The Atlantic), the origins of the name "Watergate" are hazy. Some say it refers to a canal lock that sits across from the complex; others believe it comes from a set of stairs leading to the water that used to sit on the current site. But the meaning of "Watergate" is literal — it’s a compound of "water", the thing you drink, and "gate", the thing you open. But really, it was just a weird name for a building until it became famous.

How did the suffix "-gate" come into widespread use? It started with a semantic shift: As news of the break-in spread and the word "Watergate" permeated American culture, it stopped just being a name for a building and started acquiring the meaning of "scandal".

Then the term "Watergate" underwent what linguists call "reanalysis". Basically, people inferred that "-gate" was what gave the term the meaning of "scandal". It’s an example of abductive reasoning; given a word’s meaning, people try to figure out how it’s derived from its component parts.

Most of the time, we’re spot on when we try to break things down. We all know that "buried" means two things:

• 1) putting something in the ground and covering it up and
• 2) that it happened in the past.

Anyone with a basic understanding of English grammar knows "buried" comes from the root "bury" and the past-tense suffix "-ed".

But sometimes, this logic is applied in a way that produces new words and meanings. Those who study language call linguistic innovations coined this way "backformations".

English has a lot of backformations—hundreds. Through Latin, English acquired the noun "editor", but there was originally no verb "edit". At some point, the word underwent reanalysis; working backward, people reasoned that it was derived from the suffix "-or" (even though it wasn’t) and that "edit" was the original verb. Voilà, a new verb.

Other examples of backformation include "aviate" from "aviator", "televise" from "television", and "tase" from "taser".

The three previous examples are verbs derived from nouns, which comprise most English backformations. But the language also features verbs derived from adjectives ("peeve" from "peevish"); adjectives from adjectives ("couth" from "uncouth"); and nouns from adjectives ("flash" from "flashy").

What’s especially interesting about the suffix "-gate" is that most back-formations tend to produce content words — nouns, verbs, and adjectives — as opposed to function words like prepositions, helping verbs, or suffixes. The suffix "-gate" isn’t entirely a function word — it still retains the meaning of "scandal". But it could one day undergo what linguists call "grammaticalization", when content words because function words.

The best-known instance of grammaticalization in English is the word "not", which comes from Old English "nawiht", meaning "no man".

It’s important to note that reanalysis and grammaticalization are not a conscious processes. Our brains are constantly at work breaking down linguistic data; it’s all automatic. No native English speaker has to pause to think about forming the past tense.

In the same way there’s no one person sitting in a room analyzing word forms, there’s no one deciding which ones stick and which don’t. Armchair grammarians like your high-school English teacher who think the future of the language is doomed may decry the "-gate" suffix as tacky and improper, but someday it may be as common and respectable as the verb "edit". Linguistic innovations, to their chagrin, tend to spread with the maddening swiftness of a lolcat meme.

Gabriel Arana is a contributing writer at Salon and a contributing editor at The American Prospect.

His site is https://gabrielarana.com/.

Als "Watergate-Affäre" (oder kurz "Watergate") bezeichnet man, nach einer Definition des Kongresses der Vereinigten Staaten, zusammenfassend eine ganze Reihe von gravierenden „Missbräuchen von Regierungsvollmachten“, die es während der Amtszeit des republikanischen Präsidenten Richard Nixon zwischen 1969 und 1974 gegeben hat. Die Offenlegung dieser Missbräuche ab Juni 1972 verstärkte in den USA massiv eine durch den Vietnamkrieg ausgelöste gesellschaftliche Vertrauenskrise gegenüber den Politikern in Washington und führte schließlich zu einem schweren Verfassungskonflikt. Höhepunkt der teils dramatischen Entwicklungen war am 9. August 1974 der Rücktritt Nixons von seinem Amt.
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Etymology, usage, and history of -gate

The suffix "-gate" derives from the "Watergate scandal" of the United States in the early 1970s, which resulted in the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon. The scandal was named after the "Watergate complex" in Washington, D.C.; the complex itself was named after the "Water Gate" area where symphony orchestra concerts were staged on the Potomac River between 1935 and 1965.

The suffix is used to embellish a noun or name to suggest the existence of a far-reaching scandal, particularly in politics and government. As a CBC News Online column noted in 2001, the term may "suggest unethical behaviour and a cover-up". The same usage has spread into languages other than English; examples of "-gate" being used to refer to local political scandals have been reported from Argentina, Germany, Hungary, Greece and the former Yugoslavia. Such usages have been criticised by commentators as clichéd and misleading; James Stanyer comments that "revelations are given the 'gate' suffix to add a thin veil of credibility, following 'Watergate', but most bear no resemblance to the painstaking investigation of that particular piece of presidential corruption." Stanyer links the widespread use of "-gate" to what the sociologist John Thompson calls "scandal syndrome":

[A] self-reproducing and self-reinforcing process, driven on by competitive and combative struggles in the media and political fields and giving rise to more and more scandals which increasingly become the focus of mediated forms of public debate, marginalizing or displacing other issues and producing on occasion a climate of political crisis which can debilitate or even paralyse a government.

The adoption of "-gate" to suggest the existence of a scandal was promoted by William Safire, the conservative New York Times columnist and former Nixon administration speechwriter. As early as September 1974 he wrote of "Vietgate", a proposed pardon of the Watergate criminals and Vietnam War draft dodgers. Subsequently he coined numerous -gate terms, including "Billygate", "Briefingate", "Contragate", "Deavergate", "Debategate", "Doublebillingsgate" (of which he later said "My best [-gate coinage] was the encapsulation of a minor ... scandal as doublebillingsgate"), "Frankiegate", "Franklingate", "Genschergate", "Housegate", "Iraqgate", "Koreagate", "Lancegate", "Maggiegate", "Nannygate", "Raidergate", "Scalpgate", "Travelgate", "Troopergate" and "Whitewatergate". The New York magazine suggested that his aim in doing so was "rehabilitating Nixon by relentlessly tarring his successors with the same rhetorical brush - diminished guilt by association." Safire himself later admitted to author Eric Alterman that, as Alterman puts it, "psychologically, he may have been seeking to minimize the relative importance of the crimes committed by his former boss with this silliness."
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-gry-
What is the third common "-gry" word?

infoplease - Roots, Prefixes, and Suffixes Dictionaries

Latin and Greek Word Elements

• Latin Roots, Prefixes, and Suffixes
• Greek Roots, Prefixes, and Suffixes

English is a living language, and it is growing all the time. One way that new words come into the language is when words are borrowed from other languages. New words are also created when words or word elements, such as roots, prefixes, and suffixes, are combined in new ways.

Many English words and word elements can be traced back to Latin and Greek. Often you can guess the meaning of an unfamiliar word if you know the meaning.

A "word root" is a part of a word. It contains the core meaning of the word, but it cannot stand alone.
A "prefix" is also a word part that cannot stand alone. It is placed at the beginning of a word to change its meaning.
A "suffix" is a word part that is placed at the end of a word to change its meaning.
Often you can guess the meaning of an unfamiliar word if you know the meaning of its parts; that is, the root and any prefixes or suffixes that are attached to it.

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English-Latin-Greek cross references samples

Here is a example from the English-Latin-Greek Cross References that will give you an idea about the format used for literally thousands of english terms are comes from Greek and Latin elements.

philo-, phil-, -phile, -philia, -philic, -philous, -phily, -philiac, -philist, -philism

(Greek: love, loving, friendly to, fondness for, attraction to, strong tendency toward, affinity for).