Australian politics is yet to rate a genuine lasting -gate, says Susan Butler
It is always interesting when a political scandal erupts to see where the -gate suffix will land. During the recent OzCar affair, the PM was clearly the target of Turnbull’s outrage but Ruddgate was not what emerged as the label for this particular storm in a car yard. Possibly that was because Ruddgate had been used up when it was applied to the suggested malpractices of the PM’s wife in supposedly siphoning off government money into her business. But I think in the end it was just that Ute-gate was more appealing. No-one ever suggested Godwin-gate or Grech-gate.
We have been very restrained with -gate in The Macquarie Dictionary, listing just Watergate and the suffix itself. I suppose that this is because none of the particular -gates that have come and gone have been sufficiently effective in claiming a political scalp at a national level. Ute-gate was interesting in that it very nearly claimed the scalp of the “gater” rather than the “gatee”. But we still wait for the big one that will take its own place in the dictionary.
A disorder or a fact of life?
Over the years, the number of disorders mentioned in the dictionary has grown as one after another they feature in the media for some reason. The latest in this series is the narcissistic personality disorder, which I duly added to the most recent update of the dictionary. This disorder is the one that Brendan Nelson suggested Malcolm Turnbull might suffer from, featuring as it does a sense of destiny and associated prestige and privileges with complete lack of empathy for others.
Other recent offerings are seasonal disorder, panic disorder, adaptive disorder and social anxiety disorder. They read rather like life – we can all get obsessed, our moods change with the weather, we panic on occasions, we find it hard to adapt to changes, and some of us are very, very shy. And some have an inflated view of our own worth and are amazingly insensitive and self-centred.
Fortunately, as a dictionary editor, I don’t have to decide their status in the rollcall of psychiatry but simply record them, noting in passing the fashions in this kind of analytical approach to the vagaries of human nature.
Softly, softly
There is a special category of euphemism that we now call “code words”, where the intention is not so much to block from our minds the taboo reference because it is so shocking but to soften the blow. It is a matter of etiquette. We wish not to confront our listeners or readers with something too blunt so we collectively hit on a form of words that everyone will understand but which will not give offence. For example, confirmed bachelor has long been understood to mean “homosexual”. To be tired and emotional is to be drunk.
I am quite fond of the use of troubled in the ABC’s news style. Whenever a state or community is troubled you know there are people out there with meat axes. We can breathe a sigh of relief when the troubled epithet is dropped and life resumes something approaching normal.
When people are troubled they are suffering some malaise of the spirit. When places are troubled they are the locus of trouble, so a “troubled residence” is one that the ambulance officers visit only with police escort. We have “troubled addresses”, “troubled nursing homes”, “troubled psych wards” and, of course, “the troubled province of Aceh” which is, thankfully, not causing trouble at the moment and so can be referred to simply as Aceh.
An old favourite among these expressions, although one with rather more point to it, is a colourful racing identity, which is clearly understood to be a reference to a criminal. By the late 1800s the term colourful, applied to things other than paint or clothes, meant “lively and full of interest”. From here it was a small move to the euphemistic use, as in “to lead a colourful life”. Colourful language was swearing.
The link to racing came about because in the early 20th century the racecourse was one of the few legitimate places to gamble and so provided the most common means of money laundering. Meanwhile journalists were hemmed in by Australian defamation laws and needed to have a safe formula to identify people involved in such practices. And so the colourful racing identity was born.
Susan Butler is the publisher of The Macquarie Dictionary
Craig Mann is a freelance cartoonist. This cartoon first appeared in the Gold Coast Bulletin
