The hashtag #Capitolgate has been trending on Twitter since a herd of flag-waving bison crashed their way into the US legislature on January 6. This is hardly surprising. Twitter demands that catchy little nicknames be appended to almost everything, and Capitolgate is easier to spell than, say, “subhumanmoronsdeclarethemselvesmoralguardiansoftheuniverse”.
Handy hashtags help people find others who are talking about the same thing, so they need to be simple. No word exists that cannot be misspelt, however. “Capitalgate” appears more frequently than it should in this seething stew of opinion.
The difference between a capital and a capitol (or a capitalised Capitol) is easy.
Capital is an adjective that changes meaning according to what it describes. It can apply to a city in which a country’s government is located; an upper case letter; a good thing; a heinous crime; a severe punishment; or various concepts related to money.
Capitol is a noun with just one meaning: a building in which lawmakers gather. When capitalised, Capitol applies only to the building in Washington DC where the US Congress meets and where feral herds of bison occasionally graze.
Capitol comes from the Capitoline Hill in ancient Rome, on which was built the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the city’s godly protector.
Things get messier when trying to disentangle the word roots of capital and capitol. The Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that both words come originally from the extremely ancient Proto-Indo-European root kaput, meaning head.
How kaput went from “head” to a slang word meaning “finished, done or destroyed” is a complicated tale involving the French, the Germans, a bonnet and a card game.
But let’s get back to Capitolgate, which is merely the latest in a long line of unfortunate words to have a gate stuck onto its rear end.
How kaput went from 'head' to a slang word meaning 'finished, done or destroyed' is a complicated tale involving the French, the Germans, a bonnet and a card game.
Everyone knows (don’t they?) that the -gate suffix owes its existence to the Watergate scandal of 1972, when Republican Party stooges broke into the Watergate Hotel and Office Building in Washington DC and stole documents from the Democratic National Committee in a bid to bolster Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign.
Instead, as we all know, it brought him tumbling down.
Post-Watergate, every mishap, catastrophe, calamity and faux pas has been gated.
Capitolgate might in some ways be the closest relative to Watergate, the progenitor of all the -gate words, but we have had to endure hundreds of minigates in the past 49 years.
Less than a year after Watergate, a satirical magazine invented a scandal supposedly involving public officials in Russia and dubbed it “Volgagate” (we will talk about fake news another time).
Since then we’ve had Monicagate, Camillagate, Britneygate, Harrygate, Nipplegate, Weinergate, Tigergate, Kanyegate, Zumagate and Guptagate, to name but a few.
Generally speaking, the -gate suffix is added only to crimes or scandals. Though some of these may have long-term disastrous consequences for many, they are mostly not on the scale of mass war and global famine. No-one, as far as I know, has been insensitive enough to use the hashtag #coronagate.
This might also explain why #Trumpgate is not really a thing. Some afflictions are too big to be contained by a gate.
Even so, this gate obsession has become rather tedious, if you ask me. I’m not the only one who thinks so. Writing for the Chicago Tribune in 2012, Rob Manker marked the 40th anniversary of Watergate with an impassioned plea for ripping the -gate suffix off its hinges permanently.
The Watergate Hotel has a lot to answer for, but as Manker points out, it could have been worse.
He writes: “Had the Intercon housed the Democratic National Committee in ’72, perhaps Janet Jackson’s infamous Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction would have later instead been dubbed ‘Nipplecon’. Had the DNC called the Biltmore home 40 years ago, maybe those escort-frequenting Secret Service agents in Colombia would have found themselves embroiled not in ‘Hookergate’, but ‘Hookermore’.”
Speculation is fun but it does not change history. Watergate opened the floodgates to a suffocating suffusion of suffixes and we are still stuck with gategate. Perhaps what we need is a gatekeeper.
There are some words that do not sit well with gate. The Duchess of Cambridge has so far done nothing to upset the British applecart, but if she were caught doing something terrible, like smuggling a ham sandwich into EU territory or wearing flip-flops or not smiling the whole way through a polo match, I somehow don’t think her misstep would become #Kategate.
Thankfully, it seems the hashtag #Gatesgate doesn’t appeal much either, even though Bill Gates — the man who has done more than any other individual to improve the health, education and lives of millions of people all over the world — is suddenly the Antichrist of the ignorami. Let’s hope this madness is soon kaput.
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