Eterno é tudo aquilo que dura uma fração de segundo, mas com tamanha intensidade que se petrifica e nenhuma força o resgata.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (31.10.1902-17.08.1987)

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Autumn

Definition – the season between summer and winter; also, a period of maturity or incipient decline

Autumn is more confusing, linguistically speaking, than most of the other seasons. It has had multiple titles (fall is common in the U.S., and it’s also been known as harvest and harvest-time), and the exact dates of the season vary some. Autumn can be defined as the time extending from the September equinox to the December solstice, or as “the season in the northern hemisphere comprising the months of September, October, and November” (in the southern hemisphere it runs from the March equinox to the June solstice). And to confuse things a bit more in British use it commonly refers to the months of August through October.

Summer has followed after Spring;
Now Autumn is so shrunk and sere,
I scarcely think a sadder thing
Can be the Winter of my year.
— Christina Georgina Rossetti, The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, 1998

Please read the complete article at https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/words-for-autumn-fall

The Watergate Scandal

The use of the suffix –gate following a relevant word to refer to scandals (such as Irangate, or more recently, Bridgegate) has long been a media trope. Most people are already aware of the origin: Watergate, the shorthand used for the scandal in which the offices of the Democratic National Committee were burglarized, with an investigation later revealing that the burglary was covered up by high-level officials in the administration of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon. The name Watergate refers to the name of the office complex, located in the Foggy Bottom district of Washington, D.C., consisting of office buildings, apartments, and the Watergate Hotel.

That scandal ultimately led to Nixon resigning from the presidency in August 1974. But by then, Watergate was itself used for scandals likened to Watergate for their levels of concealment and corruption:

“Why obviously?” “Jesus, Doctor!” He was momentarily indignant. “What sort of a question is that? A Central American Watergate you want now?” “I only asked.”
— Eric Ambler, Doctor Frigo, 1974

Usage After Watergate

By the time of Nixon’s resignation, the use of –gate as a somewhat mocking way to suffix the names of scandals (political or otherwise) had already taken hold in the American media and continued throughout the decade.

Last week the French wine industry was in ferment over the disclosure of a fraudulent scheme to peddle cheap wine as expensive Bordeaux … “You’ll think it’s exaggerating to say this, but the U.S. had Watergate and now we have our winegate,” a Bordeaux journalist told Newsweek’s Seth Goldschlager.
— Newsweek, 10 Sept. 1973

The suspects allegedly falsified records, fed incriminating evidence through a paper shredder and conducted a cover-up so pervasive that one investigator calls it “Ice Cream Gate.”
— Time, 18 Aug. 1975

Since obscenity is known to be the most low-investment-high-return of all businesses, there should be an investigation to ascertain whether payoffs are blocking enforcement of the law. May we have a burlesk-gate on our hands.
— The Pueblo Star-Journal, 17 May 1979

Some instances of the –gate suffix led to serendipitously punny phrasings that were likely too juicy for a writer to pass up.

For example, appending –gate to the last name of Daniel J. Flood, a long-serving U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania, yielded Floodgate when accusations surfaced in 1978 that he used his office to direct money and contracts to favored people and corporations in exchange for kickbacks.

In the 1980s, a scandal involving sexual misconduct and misappropriation of funds by the televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker led to New York Times columnist Russel Baker to coin the name PearlyGate, cleverly echoing the phrase pearly gates, envisioned as the place where one earns entrance to Heaven as described in Revelation 21:21.

Modern ‘-Gate’ Scandals

The –gate suffix has continued to be applied to more recent scandals, generations after its originator, seemingly with the paradoxical effect of simultaneously magnifying and diminishing the affair in question.

Bridgegate was the name for what was known more descriptively as the Fort Lee Lane Closure Scandal, in which lanes at the toll plaza on the upper level of the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey were closed by members of the administration of New Jersey governor Chris Christie purportedly as an act of retribution against Fort Lee’s mayor, Mark Sokolich.

When New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was accused of using underinflated footballs during the AFC Championship Game against the Indianapolis Colts in January 2015—a violation that ultimately resulted in Brady receiving a four-game suspension the following season—the scandal became known in the media as Deflategate.

And there are dozens of others, before and after and in between: Nipplegate (in which Janet Jackson’s breast was exposed during the Super Bowl halftime show); Skategate (a judging scandal regarding the pairs’ figure skating event at the 2002 Winter Olympics); and Spygate (another scandal involving the New England Patriots, accused of using video equipment to record the signals used by their opponents).

For every scandal, it seems, there will always be a gate. Remember to close it on your way out.

To read the article in full, please visit the website: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/gate-suffix-scandal-word-history

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/greta-thunberg-congress-speech-climate-change-crisis-dream-a9112151.html

Scots is one of the three indigenous languages in Scotland, along with English and Scottish Gaelic.

English is spoken throughout the country, Gaelic is mostly spoken in the Highlands and the Western Isles and Scots is spoken all through the Lowlands, the Scottish cities and in the Northern Isles.

Scots has often been mistaken for slang, and it is not widely known as a language in its own right or that it is of Anglo-Saxon origin.

The reality is that Scots has some 60,000 unique words and expressions.

There are many varieties of Scots and some of these have names of their own, like the Doric, used in the north-east. Some others are known as dialects, like the spoken languages in Caithness, Orkney or Shetland, or even the varieties spoken in the cities of Glasgow, Dundee and Edinburgh.

Scots has its own history, a wide variety of unique grammatical features, a huge store of idiomatic expressions and a number of sounds that are never used in English. For these reasons, many linguists and academics today agree that Scots is a language in its own right.

Scots has finally achieved official recognition as a minority language by the European Commission for Regional and Minority languages, and it is accorded special protection by the UK and Scottish Governments. It was even included in the 2011 census, which showed that 1.5 million people identified themselves as speaking or understanding Scots. This only shows that the language is alive and well in the first Century.

References:

Scots Tongue. http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~kjt/general/scots.html. Accessed August 6, 2019.

Aberdeen Uof. North-East Scots (Doric): The History, Present & Future (Complete Video). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH8pxfqgSBQ. Published February 13, 2019. Accessed August 6, 2019.

AMC’s FITS Project produces video on the origins of the Scots language. Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics. http://www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/?p=2030. Accessed August 6, 2019.

Languages. Scottish Government. https://www.gov.scot/policies/languages/scots/. Accessed August 6, 2019.

Mapping Sounds to Spellings. From Inglis to Scots. http://www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/fits/. Accessed August 6, 2019.

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Written by Maria Blanca Escudero Fontan, trainee in the Direction of the Directorate B and in TermCoord. Holds a Degree in Translation and Interpretation ( Universidade de Vigo) and a MA in International Studies (USC).