Gates are for fields and gardens, not scandals

This headline is in the (Glasgow) Herald this morning:

Bid to reveal Wendygate facts

Wendygate? Wendygate?

Antennagate was bad enough, but I think Wendygate may be the worst yet. The Watergate scandal, from which every -gate gets its suffix, was the name of a hotel. Adding -gate to something doesn’t make any sense.


Posted

in

by

Comments

0 responses to “Gates are for fields and gardens, not scandals”

  1. What if Gareth Gates died suspiciously, impaled on his own garden entrance. That could be GarethGatesGateGate ;)

    (shamelessly stolen from some long-forgotten post on Twitter)

  2. Have you seen the Mitchell & Webb Watergategate sketch?

    – I was just going to say that my eye was caught by this whole scandal in America.

    – Oh, the scandal in America. Yeah, that is interesting. That must be the biggest scandal since Watergategate.

    – Watergategate? Isn’t it just Watergate?

    – No. That would mean it was just about water. No, it was a scandal or gate, add the suffix gate, that’s what you do with a scandal, involving the Watergate Hotel. So it was called the Watergate scandal, or Watergategate.

  3. Gary

    Haha, yes. Exactly :)

  4. Used to shop in the grocery store at the Watergate building, so to me “Watergate” conjures up images of ridiculously wealthy 70 year old women with big hair and little dogs in their handbags.

    That and Monica Lewinsky hiding in a scarf and sunglasses reading a tabloid headline about herself in the supermarket queue (true story).