I’ve written about annoying linguistic habits before in other venues: I’ve lamented the erosion of our language due to unchecked political correctness, and I once picked on some poor slob blogger who used the word “pension” when he clearly meant “penchant.”

The erosion of real communication, however, is not the only problem I have with language these days. One of the most annoying habits I’ve seen, eclipsing even the infiltration of rapper-words into our everyday speech (“Fo’shizzle, Ted, I’ll get that report to you right away”), is the overuse of clever prefixes and suffixes added on to words as linguistic short-cuts.

Folks (and by “folks” I mean media types), it’s time to stop adding “-gate” to the end of the name of every political scandal. Why? Well not for the reason you’d think. Not because it seems on the surface to be the liberally-biased media’s thinly veiled attempt to continually malign Richard Nixon, who’s been dead for quite some time… but because – to be honest – the new generation of news hounds doesn’t even know what it means.*

This notion first occurred to me a few years ago, when I had the rare opportunity to go to a movie by myself. I picked a movie that I knew the rest of my family would have had no interest in – a small-budget and utterly charming flick called “Dick.” This promised to be the kind of movie I knew instinctively I would love, because it broached the subject of one of my childhood’s pivotal events (the fall of Richard Nixon) with obvious humor and the awkward premise that the goings-on in the Watergate Hotel were perpetrated by a couple of teen-age girls with crushes on the President.

Of course it figures that the two people who sat behind me in the theater were the type to talk all through the movie, but what I heard from those rear seats astounded me: the woman, who sounded like she was at least in her 30’s, didn’t know who Richard Nixon was or anything about Watergate! Her husband/date/boyfriend, obviously a little older, was having to explain it all to her, pointing out which of the movie’s comic bits were references to famous Watergate “clues” (like the duct-taped doorway and the 18 minutes of missing tape).

It occurred to me then, and it’s a sad fact now, that the significance of adding “-gate” to the end of the names of political scandals is already lost on the youngest pol-junkies in our midst, and will soon be lost altogether as our influence gives way to the Snoop-Dog generation. I’ll admit that sometimes the practice results in some clever hybrid words (Hillary’s “Travelgate” and John Kerry’s “Medalgate” are two that worked well), but more often than not it simply creates awkward hybrids that don’t trip easily off the tongue (“Monica-gate,” “Iran-Contra-gate”) and only succeeds in making us look like a bunch of hopeless squares who still think we’re the target market.

*important to note that the journalists still know what it means – they are taught infinite reverance for all things Woodward and Bernstein in Reporting 101. It’s the new generation of news consumers I’m talking about who don’t know what the hell -gate means.