Bill Simmons recently pushed for "zoo" as the new word, but I've been pushing for "fist" for a long time. Come on, say it with me now: "Water-blood." "Water-face." "Water-slap." Totally doable, right?I think he has a real point here. Watergate was a hell of a long time ago. Nixon was a hell of a long time ago. It's not just tedious or unoriginal to end everything in "-gate," but it's probably slowly losing its meaning with each successive generation (or mini-generation?). As a caveat, I'll say the original scandal remains very important in America, but I think the suffix is losing meaning, especially as it becomes applied to everything under the sun from a stray comment by Harry Reid on Obama's race to an alleged (I think it was totally made up) campaign mailer misrepresentation attempt by my former mayor back in the 90s on a tax override campaign in a city of 80,000 people to Barack Obama vacationing in Hawaii without the press in tow.
Plus, in my opinion, the original Watergate scandal (the break-in, the coverup, the whole 1972 campaign operation) is peanuts compared to some of the scandalous stuff that went down under George W. Bush, and at least Nixon had the decency to resign eventually, in the face of an alert and assertive Congress seriously threatening impeachment proceedings. Worse, with more years in the rear-view mirror, the Nixon administration's involvement in Watergate is arguably one of the least bad things out of all the terrible things it was involved in (cf. secret bombing of Cambodia?). So Watergate was bad, but let's put the scandalgate era to bed and find a better phrase.
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