In this age of 140-character soundbites and SEO-slanted headlines, every news event demands its own pithy portmanteau. A storm is never a storm — it’s a “Snowpocalypse” or “Snowmageddon.” A Jewish holiday that falls on Thanksgiving necessarily becomes “Thanksgivukkah.” Now the Internet must decide on a moniker for Chris Christie’s ongoing bridge scandal, because “Chris Christie’s ongoing bridge scandal” takes far too long to type.
That moniker, love it or hate it, is definitively Bridgegate. Bridgeghazi and Bridge-gate, hyphenated, please give up.
Observe the number of tweets with each name since Christie’s marathon press conference yesterday. The light blue line (and clear winner) is Bridgegate, with 9,987 tweets. Behind that, it’s the hyphenated Bridge-gate (1,609) and distant third Bridgeghazi (469).
There are many merits to calling the scandal Bridgeghazi, of course, most notably that it’s (1) monumentally more clever than the tired “-gate” suffix and (2) not also the name of a British security company, a defunct drug clinic, a California recruiting firm and a purported film production company with a very sketchy Web site. (“BridgeGate Executive Search would like to thank the office of NJ Governor #ChrisChristie and all media outlets for some of the best unintentional PR we could imagine,” one of the many preexisting BridgeGates wrote on Facebook yesterday.)
You’re welcome, BridgeGate Executive Search. The Internet has spoken, and headline-writers should heed it.