The end of Litmus-gate

By Kelsey | January 24th, 2008 | 6 Comments »

Let’s retire the use of “gate” as a suffix to signify a scandal. It’s overdone, uncreative, and annoys the crap out of me. This morning on the news they talked about “boot-gate,” which is about Tom Brady, the New England Patriots QB who was seen in New York wearing a walking cast. The original gate of course was Watergate, which is the name of the hotel that Nixon’s flunkies broke into and eventually led to his impeachment. Tom Brady’s boot has nothing to do with paper shredding, hotels, the President, or a scandal. Hell, it’s two weeks until the Superbowl.

Let’s stop the madness before some famous person scandalously hops a gate, steals a gate, or is hit with a gate and we are subjected to the Gate-gate scandal. And if that famous person was Antonio Gates, the Pro Bowl Tight-end for the San Diego Chargers, we’d end up with the ridiculosity that’d be Gates-Gate-Gate scandal. And if that took place at the Watergate Hotel…

While we are retiring annoying language habits, let’s put an end to the use of “Rorschach test” and “litmus test” used to describe anything but staring at ink blots on paper or testing for an acid or base. I suppose sports journalists are the worst at using these. Many of them are retired former athletes and I think they like to show off the fact that they showed up for Science class in Junior High where they turned a blue paper red and to Psychology 101 when they saw a naked girl in the ink blots in their textbook.

“Bill, this game is going to be a litmus test to see if the Patriots can overcome the Spy-gate controversy.”

Isn’t that sentence just an inflated version of: “Bill, this game is going to be a test to see if the Patriots can overcome controversy.”?

So if you don’t use these and I don’t use these, bit by bit we can change the world.