Watergate, the office complex where the Democratic National Committee Headquarters was located in 1972, became the shorthand term for the entire scandal of President Nixon’s Administration, of which the burglarizing of the Watergate complex was but one part. As such, I blame him for this article. It was shortly after Watergate that a wine merchant in France was found guilty of thinning his wine with water, and was sentenced to prison. It’s an obvious evolution; this scandal was referred to as Winegate.

This set the stage for every political scandal from the 70’s to present day to be referred to as something-gate. It’s spread even further than that today, not even needing to be political to earn the -gate suffix. Any scandal can be a -gate, as is neatly summarized in this Wikipedia article. The suffix -gate, independently from traditional evolving lines of etymology, has taken on a completely new meaning in the English language. It now means “scandal”.

It is hardly the only one, however. While thinking about this, I realized there are all sorts of suffixes which have been lopped off other perfectly fine words, and applied to variations of that thing, thereby taking on a new meaning which only tangentially relates to the original thing. In most of these instances, these new meanings have not even made their way into the dictionary. Here are a few I came up with.

-aholic
Originates from “alcoholic”, meaning one who is addicted to alcohol.
Now means: Any addiction

I’ll admit it, I’m an informationaholic and an internetaholic, and despite neither of these being a word, you know exactly what they mean: I’m addicted to gathering and learning new information about things, and I’m addicted to the internet. These addictions are perhaps not so severe or life-threatening as an alcoholic’s, and so the term has become a little flippant. Nevertheless, -aholic remains the catch-all suffix for “being addicted to something”.

What I find interesting, however, is how this has not migrated over to addictions which were already understood before the -aholic suffix was hijacked to describe them (according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the first use was sugerholic in 1965). Most people still talk about how someone is addicted to cigarettes, rather than being a cigarettaholic. In fairness, though, I have heard someone being described as a nicotinaholic, so that might count. But even though these aren’t standard, you still understood them, demonstrating that when you need to explain that someone is addicted, it’s -aholic you call on.

-core
Originates from “hardcore”, meaning explicit.
Now means: Genre

Hard rock used to be hardcore. It was the edgier, louder, and more aggressive version of rock. Eventually, another group—probably looking to distinguish themselves even further from what they considered to be the “mundane” rock scene—defined their even edgier, louder-er, and even more aggressive music as “hardcore”. Then other genres got their own hardcore: hardcore punk, hardcore metal, hardcore d&b. Finally, one enterprising music fan (or a music industry marketing genius, perhaps?) just mashed the genre together with the -core. At one point this was legit: skacore can be described as a combination of hardcore alternative rock and ska. But this was ripe for exploitation from the very beginning, and so, in time, this gave rise to such evil spawn as grindcore, spazcore, and happycore.

As far as I know, there is no “happy” genre of music—you don’t go into the record shop and ask for “happy”—so you can’t very well have a happy hardcore blend to call happycore. Likewise with “spaz” or “grind” or a myriad of other constructions. What this essentially means is that happycore is, itself, a genre of music, and the way we know this is so is because it contains the -core suffix. It used to describe the style of the genre itself—harder, grittier, more extreme—but now it just means “genre”.

-stan
Originates from any number of middle eastern countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, etc, meaning “land where the [tribe] stands”.
Now means: A Country of Arabs.

The -stan suffix is actually a legitimate one. It comes from Farsi, meaning “the place where our people stand (or live)”. So the place where the Uzbeks live is Uzbekistan. The Afghanis live in Afghanistan, and so on.

But in today’s world of fighting terrorists in obscure middle-eastern sounding countries, who really has time to keep track of all these? Like what about Kyrgyzstan? Is that a real country or did I just make it up? Aside from the -stan, it doesn’t even have vowels! Who can tell?

Easier to just lump all the middle eastern countries together. There are terrorists, right? And Muslims? Does it end with -stan? No? Well two out of three ain’t bad. Better invade it just to be safe. I’m telling you, if we let the Iraqistans off the hook now, before you know it we’ll be living in Americistan.

-more
Originates from Mount Rushmore, the name of the mountain upon which the busts of four United States Presidents are carved.
Now means: A Pile of Stuff

This suffix is kind of cheating, because I’ve never seen an example of it without “Mount” in front. It’s more like a meme than a true newly defined suffix. The meme structure is “Mount [stuff]more” to describe a big pile of [stuff]. The most famous variation is probably Mount Trashmore in Virginia Beach, VA. It’s a landfill turned park. The landfill was composed of alternating, compacted layers of waste and soil, and now it’s a grassy mound-like shape gently rising up next to route 264. Another variation I’ve heard is that Centralia is located on Mount Burnmore.

It’s really more of a dismissive suffix than something to be taken seriously. But from what I can tell, everyone immediately grasps the intent of the Mount [stuff]more construct, so I think it fits in the list.

-punk
Originates from cyberpunk, meaning a counterculture group with access to high technology.
Now means: Genre

There is one person we can ultimately point to as the originator of this trend: science fiction author Bruce Bethke. He wrote a collection of short stories in 1983 called Cyberpunk, which is considered to be the first use of the term in print. In much the same way I blame President Nixon for the naming of subsequent -gate scandals, I blame the proliferation of -punk genres on Bethke.

Cyberpunk is actually a pretty good term for what was happening at the time. The punk rock movement had been gaining momentum for a few years, and “cyber” stuff—computers, AI, and technology in general—was starting to become accessible to individuals rather than just large corporations. Adding them together does result in the sum of cyberpunk.

Then sometime in the early 90’s came steampunk. Alright, that’s a little goofy, but people understood what it meant. It was the “punk”-like hacker culture from cyberpunk using Victorian-era, steam based technology. The notion even has some legitimacy, what with Charles Babbage and Nicoli Tesla and so on. But authors couldn’t stop there! No, they had to go back further and write about clockpunk: hacker types in Da Vinci’s time making things run on springs and gears and that sort of clockwork. The quasifuture from the art deco era is dieselpunk, and the 50’s future of a tail-finned, nuclear-powered life is now atompunk. Following these absurd constructions, people like Bruce Sterling looked into the future again, but since it was the future now—and the future turned out to be not so much like Neuromancer—they had to come up with some new new technology, which in Sterling’s case he called ribopunk.

And exactly like what happened with -core, people started to apply it to genres unrelated to the technological element. There’s elfpunk for cryin’ out loud! Mythpunk for your older gods! Splatterpunk for horror fans! These things may be centered around some technology, but they just as easily may not be, meaning that -punk is the literary version of music’s -core. It just means “genre”.

-tini
Originates from martini, meaning a cocktail made from gin and vermouth, garnished with an olive, served in a shallow, conical glass.
Now means: Any alcohol served in a shallow, conical glass.

As people began to bastardize their martinis with non-traditional martini ingredients, the names began to shift. (If there’s one great thing about alcohol, it’s the drink names.) It started innocently enough with the Gibson—a martini garnished with an onion—and the dirty martini—a martini with added olive juice. Then people started mixing completely different types of alcohol with the martini. It probably started with the vodka martini—substituting vodka for gin. It’s a nice drink, but let’s face facts: Vod-Ka-Mar-Tin-I takes a really long time to say. Why not just shorten it to, say, vodkatini?

It was all down hill from there. You’ve got the pickletini, the appletini, the choclatini, and even—good heavens—the bacontini. As different types of alcohol were used in place of gin, that began to shift the name too. In addition to the vodkatini, there’s the sakitini, the whiskitini (more commonly known as a smokey martini, but I’m on a roll, here), and the taquini. If you substitute beer for the gin, you’ve got a mantini.

It might seem like the key ingredient is vermouth. After all, if you’re just substituting the gin, you’ve still got at least one martini ingredient in there, right? Yes, but remember that you can have an extra dry martini, which is just gin. (Or with a “dash” of vermouth, which I think means unstopping the bottle and waving it around the kitchen while a glass of gin sits nearby.) So if gin by itself is a dry martini, and you substitute the gin with vodka, a dry vodkatini is really nothing more than a double-shot of vodka in a conical glass.

At this point, I’m waiting for someone to improve upon the mantini. One of these days someone’s going to invent a “dry” mantini by pouring half a bottle of Coors Light in a cocktail glass. It would, of course, be a beertini.

-Ted