President Obama shakes hands with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Beijing on November 18 (David Gray-Pool/Getty)

It had been unusually long, maybe more than two weeks, since a minor swerve somewhere in government was compared with a scandal that brought down a president. You know, that all-too-natural tendency to use the word “gate” as a suffix and tack it onto words to make them sound salacious, like Watergate.

Thankfully, the alert news hounds at Fox News, like Greta Van Susteren, were around to talk about how Barack Obama bowed to Japan’s emperor, or “bow-gate.”

Thirty-seven years ago, two Washington Post reporters began investigating a story that wove connections between a burglary in a Watergate office and Richard Nixon, whose aides worked to cover it up but couldn’t stop the eventual resignation of the president. Journalism owes a lot to those reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, mostly for looking into a scoop about an office complex with such a catchy name, Watergate, so memorable that it now refers to the scandal and not the building.

Imagine how Woodward and Bernstein and the general manager of Watergate must feel now, seeing four-ninths of a word that meant so much be used for so little. While Obama was in Tokyo, he bowed to Japan’s emperor, who is mostly a figurehead but is revered across the country. Obama’s advisers probably reminded him, if he didn’t know, that it’s more than polite to bow in Japan — it’s customary among everyone. The garbagemen bow if you hand them a piece of trash to throw away.

However, as has been repeated, not every American president has bowed to Japan’s leaders. Language is easy enough to get lost in translation, but body language is sometimes trickier. Should Obama have bowed? Should he have bowed at a more acute angle? Was a handshake all he needed? Who knows — but what’s for sure is that “bow-gate” will not resonate for more than about a week, much less decades, which is for how long we’re still talking about Nixon’s tapes.

Let’s be fair and not forget other recent mishaps comparable to a president resigning:

Shorts-gate and arms-gate: These refer to when Michelle Obama wore clothing other than pants, because it was summer, and when she wore dresses without sleeves, because people make clothing like that and some people, like Michelle Obama, buy them. I can hear Ron Ziegler trying to spin this one already.

Gates-gate: Almost too hard to resist, this one was about how Obama invited Henry Louis Gates Jr. to the White House for a beer with the officer who arrested him at his home in July. To be impartial to everyone who used this expression, there probably was a gate at the White House through which Gates had to walk. Probably.

Trooper-gate: A little harder to forget, this semiscandal swam from Alaska to the Lower 48 during the presidential campaigns as Sarah Palin faced criticism that she fired a state officer because he had an uncomfortable divorce with her sister. Then an ethics panel gave an ambiguous ruling on the whole thing and it lost its punch.

I wince to cite Wikipedia, but it has a somewhat useful list of other -gates. Some are absurd, like Falla-gate (a political pinch in Guernsey, an island in the English Channel, about a hospital) and two Granny-gates (a rugby skirmish about family history in New Zealand, and a football player’s claim in Ireland that his grandma died so he could get a leave of absence). Interestingly, “troopergate” and “tasergate” link to the same page. Is that evidence of a Wikipedia editor trying to boost page views by duplicating article links? Hmm? Do I hear Gate-gate? Or would it be -Gate-gate?

Whatever it is, let’s lock it shut.

The world of health care firms is spinning as a possible overhaul hangs over them. But one cog in the system that has stayed locked in place is their use of a word that isn’t quite a word, but one that is repeated daily in stories about the health debate.

The word is “pre-existing,” as in “pre-existing condition,” a term that refers to a person’s health state on the day a new insurance plan begins. Many lawmakers who want to change the country’s health care system want to end the practice of insurance companies denying coverage to people because they have such conditions.

A question, though, is why these instances aren’t called simply “existing conditions.” If you have diabetes and you begin a new health plan, your diabetes exists. It doesn’t pre-exist. In fact, your diabetes just is — it’s not even an “existing condition.” It’s a condition.

But in the arena of careful speak, policymakers can’t be too cautious. They have the same instinct that event organizers get when they ask people to “preregister” for something, as if anyone could sign up for a book release after it happened.

The same thing occurred during the presidential primaries, when Barack Obama was criticized for saying he would meet with the leaders of hostile countries like Iran and North Korea “without preconditions.” Actually, the question came up in a CNN debate on July 23, 2007, when a questioner on a YouTube screen asked the Democratic candidates:

Would you be willing to meet separately without preconditions during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?

Soon after Obama was sworn in, the new Web site for the White House posted this policy:

Barack Obama supports tough and direct diplomacy with Iran without preconditions. The Bush administration made direct talks between the US and Iran conditional on Iranian suspension of its uranium enrichment programme. This step breaks that conditionality, as part of a fundamental shift in diplomatic approach. The Obama agenda said the new administration will “talk to our foes and friends” and not set preconditions.

Interesting how they didn’t say “preconditional” or “preconditionality.” Maybe it’s because when you type those words, a squiggly red mark underlines them.

What’s the difference between a condition and a precondition? This word has been used a lot by the White House, in prepared remarks and in briefings. Is a precondition something that must happen before a condition can be made? Before a diplomat determines the conditions under which to meet an adversary, he first must brush his teeth. That’s a precondition.

Parsing the language at the intersection of public officials, the private sector and the news media — talk about a pre-existing precondition.

Most of us learn the acrostic poem when in elementary school. We start the art by writing our names down the left side of a page, with one letter on a line. Then, rarely modestly, we think of attributes about ourselves that start with those letters, and because we’re in second grade, the most common traits are “nice” and “boogers.”

People with letters like K and X in their names like to cheat by using them in the middle of words, and those who have R’s like to use adjective phrases, like this:

Magnificent

Adventurous

Really cool

LiKable

A flawless acrostic is tough to nail, especially without being repetitive. Which makes it all the more admirable how Arnold Schwarzenegger, consciously or otherwise, fit “Fuck You” down the side of a letter to the California State Assembly last week. Here’s the full text:

The governor’s office has said that the poem was unintentional. We might never know for sure, but Schwarzenegger’s word choice can give us hints. If it was purposeful, the first two lines aren’t too impressive. “For some time” and “unnecessary bills” are common enough to appear in that order. Even “health care” is probably innocent, because it’s so newsworthy. Where I get tripped up is with the expression “kicks the can.” That’s not a phrase used very often, and it mixes metaphors: the administration brought issues “to the table,” and then lawmakers kicked a can down an alley. It’s at least a little suspicious.

Plenty of words can be formed accidentally — the governor’s press secretary pointed out that previous letters spelled out “soap” and “poet” vertically. It’s also fairly difficult to write an acrostic without seeming stilted and clunky. If you read the first paragraph of this post again, you’ll see that I wrote out “Matt N.” down the side. That took me about 20 minutes, and I had to use some awkward phrasing, like calling the acrostic poem “the art” and setting aside “rarely modestly” to bump words over — hardly a graceful introduction.

I’m reminded of a time at my college newspaper when we lost a bet to our rivals at Boston College and had to write a letter praising their hockey team. Our sports editor took a fairly long time trying to write “BC sucks” in acrostic style, and he wound up using phrases like, “Contemporary knowledge would lead one to believe …” Harder than it seems.

But in defense of my description, an acrostic is very much an art. They were used by ancient Greeks, Latin poets and monks hundreds of years ago, and are said to be common among secret religious cults. And Lewis Carroll, an acrostic “master,” dedicated “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” to Alice Pleasance Liddell by writing her name down an acrostic at the end of “Through the Looking Glass.” Not exactly effortless.

Schwarzenegger’s profane poem doesn’t reach the same elegance — or maybe even the same level of intent — but it’s an acrostic nonetheless. And if he did it entirely by accident, wanting for some reason to create the image of a can being kicked down an alley, then credit must be given to a natural wordinator.

Like a werewolf’s howl accompanying a full moon, days of awful phrases tweaked to relate to Halloween are upon us. Warning: This haunted house can get ugly.

The ostensible notion is that as Halloween nears, as it does every year, the American people are dying to hear ordinary words replaced by spooky words, or barely readable combinations of them. The most ghastly effort (see how old this is getting?) I’ve seen so far was a local news anchor promoting the weekend’s weather “gorecast.” A headline I saw that read just “Spooktacular” isn’t far behind.

But there are more important matters to mangle with bad puns, like the health care debate. Credit must be given to Campbell Brown of CNN for giving air time to this death panel: (She did, however, call these lines “scary.”)

Rep. Mike Conaway, Republican of Texas:

On this Halloween week, I urge the speaker to take off the mask of reform.

Really a tremendous effort to justify a play on words by declaring “this Halloween week,” which I guess is like the 12 days of Christmas, but without any sort of meaning. I give it two out of five vampires because it sucks.

Rep. Ted Poe, Republican of Texas:

In the dark caverns of the Capitol, where the trolls roam at night, the Halloween health care bill is being drafted by a secret few.

This reminds me of Norm Coleman’s lawyer, who questioned two court rulings for Al Franken because they were a “Friday the 13th order” and an “almost April Fool’s Day order” (it was March 31). Also, this claim about “trolls” scurrying from Nancy Pelosi’s office to what can be only some sort of dungeon master seems out of place, but nonetheless creative. Yet he used three metaphors in one sentence, which sounds like overkill. I’ll award three out of five pieces of candy corn because it’s sweet at first, but then it gets bitter.

Rep. Denny Rehberg, Republican of Montana:

Stitched together in hidden laboratories from parts of at least five different bills and countless special interests, the final health care monster will ultimately hurt American seniors.

If you don’t get the Frankenstein reference, read it again (stitched). Nicely done. Four out of five Levi Johnston costumes because it’s subtle.

Ted Poe, again:

That’s Halloween health care, and it’s coming to your door. Trick or treat.

I’m assuming he’s saying that it’s not a treat. But the kids will like that. Five out of five pumpkins because it’s gord-geous.

The few times when Dick Cheney has spoken publicly since he left office, he has been more direct than you might expect of a former vice president. No longer bound by the red tape of the White House and small armies of message-control cadets, he has said that Barack Obama will probably make it easier for terrorists to attack, that the president has made the country less safe, and that he is being indecisive on the war in Afghanistan.

And when Cheney speaks, it sounds like a roar — not because of his tone, but because of his bluntness. In speeches and in interviews, he doesn’t ramble like Sarah Palin has, and he rarely trips up on his words. Even on the spot, his grammar is great, and his control of language is persuasive.

A good example is his most recent newsworthy item that has been hot since he spoke at the Center for Security Policy, when he said Obama was “dithering” on his options in Afghanistan after vowing to troops that he would give them “defined goals.” His audience rose and applauded him for 25 seconds, whistling and cheering:

It’s time for President Obama to make good on his promise. The White House must stop dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger.

Cheney, for all his baritone rasp, is a poignant speaker. He builds up to his big lines, and when he jokes, he even laughs with what sounds like real laughter. If he writes his own speeches, his vocabulary is near perfect — not too much out of grasp and only occasionally a bureaucratic slip. (Watch his speech here.) For example, when talking about intelligence, he might use slightly technical terms — “to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9/11,” as he told John King in March. But he can be frank, like when he said about Russia in his speech last week:

Anybody who has spent much time in that part of the world knows what Vladimir Putin is up to. And those who try placating him, by conceding ground and accommodating his wishes, will get nothing in return but more trouble.

The memoirs that Cheney plans to write will probably be worth reading. He will have months to revise his manuscript and read it over in his sleep. But even on his toes, he is sharp. When Politico interviewed him a few weeks after Obama was sworn in, he answered with a line that sounded as if it had come from a thought-out memo:

When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry.

For political reasons, he probably wouldn’t fare too well if he were to run for president in three years. But as a speechwriter for someone like Bobby Jindal, he could be a real text angler.