You've heard of Samuel Adams and John Hancock, the Massachusetts patriots who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. But spare a thought for another member of the pantheon: Elbridge Gerry. He unwittingly gave us "gerrymander," our Word of the Week — part of NPR's series examining the origin and etymology of common words.
As Founding Fathers go, it's safe to say that Gerry (pronounced "Gary") is not the most prominent, even though he was among the earliest and most vocal supporters of American independence from Great Britain. Later, Gerry was one of only three delegates to the Constitutional Convention who refused to put his name on the document in part because at the time it lacked a Bill of Rights — those first 10 amendments that lay down basic freedoms and protections. He even became President James Madison's second vice president, although he died in office less than two years later.
"Gerry was important, particularly in the early years during the Revolutionary War," says historian and author David O. Stewart says Gerry was "a fiery guy," though he was also "small and skinny," with a "squint and a stutter." His 20th-century biographer, George Athan Billias, described him as a "nervous, birdlike little person." John Adams, meanwhile, saw in Gerry a stubborn streak that made him willing to fight over minor matters, writing that he "will risk great things to secure small ones." Alas, Gerry never got a beer named after him. Nor is he remembered for a signature so famous as to become synonymous with an autograph itself.
You can put your John Hancock on that. But his name lives on in "gerrymandering" — the practice of manipulating voting-district boundaries to give one political party or group an unfair electoral advantage. It's a word that has become inescapable as redistricting fights rage across the U.S. before midterm elections.
To understand, we need to go back to 1812, when Gerry was the governor of Massachusetts. He signed a redistricting bill that created a sprawling, contorted state senate district designed to benefit his own party, the Democratic-Republican Party, in elections against rival Federalists. A newspaper published a cartoon depicting the misshapen district as a winged, clawed monster, seemingly poised to strike the neighboring Federalist-dominated districts.
It was termed a "Gerry-mander": a portmanteau of "Gerry" and "salamander." "What's curious to me about it is that it's a word, but it comes out of a visual image," says Doug Harper, the founder of the etymology dictionary etymonline.com. "Someone actually drew the picture and published it in the newspaper, along with the coining of the word," he says, but adds, "It doesn't look like a salamander." It wasn't the first time a district had been manipulated for electoral advantage, nor would it be the last. And that electoral monster was just the first of a number of amusingly shaped districts, thanks largely to the public's tendency toward pareidolia.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
