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What Bridezillas Can Tell Us About English
Sometimes a suffix takes on a life of its own.
Posted September 13, 2024 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer
Key points
- Some suffixes, like "-zilla," are used only in certain contexts.
- Others, such as "-gate," have proven to be remarkably adaptable.
- Sometimes a suffix takes on a life of its own.
Speakers of English are adept at creating new terms by stringing together parts of other words. This is often accomplished by tacking a prefix onto the beginning of a word (as in prosocial or microtransaction), or by appending a suffix to a word’s end (as in bracketology or bingeable).
There are no rules that govern this process. If the resulting construction is useful—that is, if it fills some gap in the language—then the new term may catch on more broadly. It might even make it to the linguistic big leagues and be added to the dictionary. Predicting which constructions will become enduringly popular, however, isn’t easy.
Consider bridezilla. This term for a soon-to-be-married woman behaving badly—and sometimes very badly—has clearly become a card-carrying member of our English vocabulary. It was, however, coined relatively recently, first appearing in a 1995 Boston Globe article entitled “Tacky Trips Down the Aisle.” Its rise in popularity was undoubtedly assisted by the WE TV series Bridezillas, which aired from 2004 to 2013.
-Zilla, of course, is the back half of Godzilla, the monster that first appeared on Japanese movie screens seventy years ago. Accounts vary, but its name may derive from a combination of the Japanese words for “gorilla” (gorira) and “whale” (kujira). The result—Gujira—was homogenized into “Godzilla” for export purposes.
A Monstrous Link to Matrimony
But how has -zilla fared as a productive suffix in English? It was, for example, pressed into service for the name of a web browser, combining “Mosaic”—the name of an even earlier browser—with -zilla, giving us Mozilla. But one must look high and low to find other examples. Whereas a Google search for “bridezilla” yields more than 3.8 million results, “groomzilla” returns fewer than 48,000. And forms not related to matrimony are even rarer: "bosszilla," for example, yields only about 5,200 results.
A certain degree of gender bias can be found lurking in these marital terms. Wiktionary defines a bridezilla as someone who “exercises a high degree of control over all major and minor details of the ceremony and reception, and makes unrealistic or outrageous demands.” Groomzillas, on the other hand, are defined as merely being “demanding and perfectionistic.” Merriam-Webster defines a bridezilla as “extremely demanding and difficult to deal with,” but fails to even offer a definition for a groomzilla.
The asymmetry may be due to the nature of American weddings, in which the focus is almost exclusively on the bride. Men, on the other hand, are expected to play the role of second banana at their own nuptials—an essential component, perhaps, but clearly not the star of the show.
But why hasn’t the -zilla suffix caught on more broadly? After all, we could be referring to copzillas, coachzillas, or even brother- and sisterzillas, but such constructions seem to be extremely rare, and it’s not even clear what behaviors they would be referring to. Perhaps -zilla failed to thrive because English already has a surfeit of words to describe people behaving badly.
As with -zilla, there are other suffixes that have achieved only limited penetration in the language. Consider -core (from “hardcore”) and used to refer to various musical genres or subcultures. It had its moment in the 1990s, when artists and critics began coining terms like foxcore (bands with female vocalists), nerdcore (music appealing to intellectuals and geeks), and speedcore (edgy electronic music).
This suffix evolved to describe a certain type of aesthetic, as in words like cottagecore (a simple rural lifestyle), normcore (nondescript neutral clothing), and mumblecore (naturalistic dialog in small-budget indie films). But -core never broke out of these fairly restricted contexts into broader usage.
A Building Becomes a Scandal
What does a successful suffix look like? In terms of sheer ubiquity, the winner of the suffix sweepstakes is almost certainly -gate. It has become the label of choice to describe events or behaviors as scandalous.
-Gate derives from the Watergate Complex—a set of apartments and office buildings in Washington DC. One of these happened to house the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in 1972 and was the site of the infamous break-in by operatives working for the Nixon administration. The site of the crime became a convenient shorthand for the series of scandals that caused the president to resign two years later.
Over time, -gate has been applied to many, many other scandals and controversies involving politicians (Chris Christie’s bridgegate, Donald Trump’s Ukrainegate), entertainers (Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s nipplegate, Will Smith and Chris Rock’s slapgate), and athletic teams (the New England Patriot’s deflategate, the Houston Astros’ spygate). And when the iPhone 4 was found to have issues with its antenna, the controversy was—perhaps inevitably—referred to as antennagate.
Wikipedia has a lengthy article devoted to -gate scandals and controversies, and at the time of this writing there are over 300 entries on the list. But its runaway success has actually made its use problematic. By applying -gate to trivial events or minor kerfuffles, the brand has been cheapened, and such constructions are now just as likely to be intended as ironic as they are literal. Does President Obama’s wearing of a tan suit really deserve the label “beigegate,” for example? Maybe -zilla is better off being applied only to brides behaving badly.
References
Kreuz, R. (2022, May). How 'gate' became the syllable of scandal. The Conversation.
