通俄门、艳照门为什么都叫“XX门”丨The scandal-related suffix

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在国家语言资源监测与研究中心去年底的 “2017年度中国媒体十大新词语”评选活动中，“通俄门”一词成功入选。

"Russia scandal" was selected as one of the Top 10 New Words of 2017 by China's leading language study organization, the National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center in December.

Also known as "Trump-Russia Scandal", it refers to claims that Russia meddled in the 2016 US presidential election and that the Trump team colluded with the Russian government to influence the outcome of the vote. 

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尽管“通俄门”是一个新词，但“XX门”这样的词语并不是首次进入读者的视线。除了“通俄门”，媒体和网络常常可以见到"门"字冠名事件。“门”原先只是一个很普通的名词，含义是"房屋、围墙、车船等出入口能开关的障蔽装置"。然而，在各种“XX门”中， “门”字已经带有了贬义色彩。

The Chinese equivalent of "Russia Scandal" is a compound word consisting of three Chinese characters. The last character is "门" (pronounced mén), which is a common noun meaning gate, door or entrance of a house.

However, this Chinese character has frequently been applied as a suffix to form words describing scandals and furors. 

But why has this character been employed in scandal-related wording? Actually, it has something to do with the English suffix "-gate".

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追根溯源，“门”字词义变化与"水门事件"密切相关。“水门事件”指美国共和党在1972年总统竞选运动中的非法活动暴露所引发的政治丑闻，因其发生在美国民主党总部——水门大厦（Watergate Complex）而得名。该事件后，“gate”逐渐成为了英文中的一个后缀，用于形容与其类似的政治丑闻,这一用法很快风靡世界。 “水门”之后，最著名的“门”事件莫过于美国前总统比尔·克林顿的“拉链门”。

The suffix "-gate" derives from the Watergate Scandal, a White House political scandal that came to light during the 1972 presidential campaign, growing out of a break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC, and culminating in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.

William Safire, a New York Times columnist and former Nixon speechwriter, was the first to detach "gate" from "water" and affixed it to political scandals. He coined at least 20 "-gate" terms in 1974. Though some said Safire attempted to deflect criticism of his former boss by "gating" other scandals, he did create a new lexical trend among column inch-limited headline writers.

After Watergate, newspapers handed US President Bill Clinton a glut of gates, the most famous being Zippergate. And "-gate" long ago escaped the bounds of American politics and its political rhetoric. It was imported into various countries for their own domestic scandals with salacity, frauds and felony, such as Canada's Tunagate in 1985 and the UK's Camillagate in 1992.

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中文中“XX门”便由“gate”这一英文后缀直译而来。2008年香港娱乐圈的“艳照门”使得“XX门”事件这一概念在中国兴起。后来"XX门"又被引申到更广的范围，一些颇具新闻效应，引起公众广泛关注的事件，都被冠上"XX门"的叫法。

Since "gate" is literally translated into the character "门" in Chinese, new meaning is added to the character and it then becomes a Chinese suffix as well. The suffix "门" was known nationwide due to the nude photo scandal of Hong Kong pop star Edison Chen in 2008.

After that, the Chinese suffix was used pervasively for events bearing resemblance to the nude photo scandal. It is gradually extended to a wider range. Besides scandals, any event can be suffixed with the Chinese character, as long as it is sensational and appealing to the public.

Last year, many people at home and abroad were found at the center of various "gates". Apart from Donald Trump's Russiagate, the most dramatic one might be the "Oscar envelopegate", in which the winner of Best Picture was wrongly announced at the 89th Academy Awards.