{"id":268212,"date":"2010-02-02T05:52:57","date_gmt":"2010-02-02T10:52:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2094"},"modified":"2010-02-02T05:52:57","modified_gmt":"2010-02-02T10:52:57","slug":"snowclonegate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/268212","title":{"rendered":"Snowclonegate"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Marsh, in the regular language column at The Guardian<\/I><\/A>, writes about the increasing frequency of -gate<\/I><\/b><\/nobr> derivatives in recent journalism, and cites Language Log:<\/p>\n

\n

All these gates are examples of a snowclone, a type of cliched phrase defined by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum as “a multi-use, customisable, instantly recognisable, timeworn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants”. Examples of a typical snowclone are: grey is the new black, comedy is the new rock’n’roll, Barnsley is the new Naples, and so on.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

X<\/B>gate<\/I> as a snowclone? Not quite. I see the conceptual similarity, but the very words he quotes show that I originally defined the concept (in this post<\/A>) as a phrase or sentence template. The X<\/B>gate<\/I> frame is a lexical word-formation analog of it, an extension of the concept from syntax into derivational morphology.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

I was looking at things like In space, no one can hear you<\/I> X<\/B>“, where the customizability is that you get to choose the verb X<\/B>, but the laziness is that you don’t have to do anything else, and just about everyone will know you are alluding to the poster slogan for Alien<\/I>. The concept was named later by someone else, Glen Whitman<\/A>, who chose “snowclone” because of the practice of cloning variants of my original example, a rather complex and ill-defined one: If the Eskimos have<\/I> N<\/B> words for snow,<\/I> X<\/B> have<\/I> {even more<\/I> \/ just as many<\/I> \/ a similar number<\/I>} for<\/I> Y<\/B>. (Eskimo-snow snowclones are still alive and well, and are being produced by lazy and unimaginative writers everywhere, just about every day; see the recent ridiculous remark that Arnold Zwicky spotted<\/A> about North Koreans having many words for “prison”.)<\/p>\n

Steve Jones, as usual, sets David Marsh right on this point in his comment below the article.<\/p>\n

The -gate<\/I><\/b><\/nobr> suffix certainly is being heavily used; and it is an interesting point that it is not us (the “normal people” of whom Marsh speaks) who are using it; it is journalists, and almost only them. The etymology is by a process called metanalysis<\/B>, rather like when helicopter<\/I> was mistakenly taken to be a combination of heli-<\/I> with copter<\/I> (it’s really from helico-<\/I> “like a helix” plus pter<\/I> “wing”), and new derivatives like heliport<\/I> were made with the wrongly analysed bits.<\/p>\n

What does -gate<\/I><\/b><\/nobr> contribute to the meaning of a derived word? X<\/B>gate<\/I> is a custom-made proper noun denoting the recent newsworthy scandal or brouhaha involving X<\/B>. One of the latest in the UK, Irisgate<\/I>, concerns a female politician with the unbelievably evocative name Mrs. Robinson who had an affair with a young man a full four decades younger than her (koo-kook-a-joo!) — and then (why can’t they just have good clean sex, these politicians, instead of bringing corruption into it?) did some backroom work to help him get financing for his business. Robinsongate<\/I> would have done fine, but her first name is Iris, and Irisgate<\/I> is shorter.<\/p>\n

Brevity, scandal, and quick-fix ways of writing stuff without actually having to think out new descriptive vocabulary or construct new phrases and sentences; that’s what keeps Britain the newspaper capital of the planet. Most mornings at the Indian shop by the bus stop on Dundas Street in Edinburgh I see no less than twelve different newspapers on the rack with twelve different front page headline stories. One will have a new scandal about apparently corrupt uses of politicians’ expenses payments (expensegate) while another uncovers a scandal about the false intelligence support that permitted the last prime minister to take the UK into a foreign war (Iraqgate) while a third finds out that the married captain of the England soccer team, John Terry, seduced the girlfriend of one of his own players, Wayne Bridge, in Bridge’s own house. Yes, the word Terrygate<\/I> has been coined already.<\/p>\n

There was an additional twist to Terrygate, having to do with Britain’s astonishing willingness to trammel free speech and gag the press. The story was nosed out by The News of the World<\/I>, but Terry obtained a court order, known as a super-injunction, that not only forbade the paper from printing its story, but also forbade all newspapers from reporting that such an injunction existed!<\/P>

I imagine that American readers of Language Log will be quite surprised at the UK’s legislative and judicial arrangements for regulating linguistic expression, which seem more North Korean than European sometimes (though we have fewer words for prison, of course).<\/p>\n

Injunctiongate did all come unglued, though: an appeal led to the lifting of the super-injunction, and all the newspapers were suddenly allowed to print everything about the (now much juicier) story, which ruined the News of the World<\/I>‘s scoop. Now the Terrygate issue is all about whether the manager of the England team (hilariously, an Italian, Fabio Capello — you can’t make this stuff up) should fire John Terry from his job. If he does, the same papers that have gloried in Terry’s vile sexual treachery (“love rat” is the term the tabloids like) will doubtless make new shock-horror-scandal-probe stories about this Italian sacking England’s captain and endangering England’s chances in some tournament or other. If England loses the next game, the scandal will probably morph into Capellogate.<\/P>

But I seem to have wandered a little from my original topic of English lexical word formation. Sorry about that.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Marsh, in the regular language column at The Guardian, writes about the increasing frequency of -gate derivatives in recent journalism, and cites Language Log: All these gates are examples of a snowclone, a type of cliched phrase defined by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum as “a multi-use, customisable, instantly recognisable, timeworn, quoted or misquoted phrase […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-268212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}