Whether or not the photographic evidence of the British prime minister allegedly “putting a private part of his anatomy” into a dead pig’s mouth ever comes to light, there is, at the very least, one thing about #Piggate of which we can be certain: it’s the 12th ‘-gate’ of 2015.
It isn’t even the first ‘-gate’ of the year to call into question the questionable advances of a Prime Minister, with New Zealand’s John Key having untangled himself from a scandal back in April. A hasty apology to the café waitress whose hair he’d been pulling playfully over a period of months saw the Kiwi leader’s ‘Ponytailgate’ join the list of 2015 faux pas including ‘FIFAgate’, ‘Deflate-gate’, ‘Twirl-gate’, and ‘Doughnutgate’, where popstar Ariana Grande was rapped on the knuckles for licking some iced rings that didn’t belong to her.
The bad news for the Tory leader, accused by Lord Michael Ashcroft (former Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party and the UK’s 37th richest person), is that in the annals of this year’s closeted skeletons, #Piggate will likely be somewhat better remembered than ‘Staingate’, which involves some very irate Apple customers not enjoying the smears and splooges appearing on their computer screens – though at least they have the images to back their claims up.
The '-gate' keepers
Most of us know the origins of the ‘-gate’ suffix, dating all the way back to the 1972 scandal that engrossed the United States and tore its president from office. On the sixth floor of the Watergate Hotel & Office Building, the national headquarters of the Democratic Party was paid a visit by burglars connected to Richard Nixon. Cover ups, money trails, Deep Throat, and some stellar work by Woodward and Bernstein later, and the biggest political scandal to shake Washington gripped the world.
But how long after Watergate broke did it take for ‘-gate’ to take its place as a morphological marker of slung mud? About a year.
Within months of the original scandal breaking, newspapers and commentators were already describing anything with a whiff of wrongdoing as ‘Watergatery’, while the person or people responsible for such dubious behaviour were dubbed ‘Watergaters’. But to find the first post-Watergate ‘-gate’, we need to look towards the American satirists at National Lampoon.
In an August 1973 issue of the magazine, an entirely made-up story about some reproachful Russians revolved around ‘Volgagate’, making a direct comparison to Nixon’s notorious fall from grace.
The popular use of ‘-gate’ as a suffix, though, is more often credited to William Safire, a New York Times columnist – and former speechwriter for Nixon – who frequently referred to any nascent scandal brewing in the US a ‘-gate’. In the 90s, a magazine put Safire in the firing line for his terminology, claiming he had trivialised the word in an effort to rehabilitate the disgraced president by “relentlessly tarring his successors with the same rhetorical brush,” an accusation to which Safire later admitted.
These days, the suffix is added liberally to almost anything the even comes close to controversy, adopted into several languages. Scandalous ‘-gates’ are a mainstay of headlines and op-eds in the English-speaking world, as well as in Argentina, Germany, Korea, Hungary and Greece. While the news stories that bring new gates to the fore – Nipplegate and Pantigate spring to mind – might well be shortlived, the suffix lays in wait to strike again.
And porcine necrophilia is as good a reason as any.
