Gramer Girl here. I'm Minion Foggedy, and this week we're going to talk about the origin

of the word gerrymandering, and about the word data. Is it singular or plural? Let's get

started.

I've been hearing the word gerrymandering a lot in the news lately. For example, a North

Carolina court ruled that its state's partisan gerrymandor was unconstitutional, and the

538 website just finished a six-part podcast series called the gerrymandering project. It's

a hot issue in American politics right now, but gerrymandering also struck me as an odd

word, and I started wondering about its origin, which turned out to be interesting. Although

most other democracies are also at least theoretically susceptible to gerrymandering, it appears

to have started in the good ol' US of A. Sorry.

Gerrymandering is fiddling with the boundaries of electoral districts to give your group

some kind of advantage. Patient zero for gerrymandering was Massachusetts all the way back in 1812

when the governor signed a bill that redrew the state's district lines to give an advantage

to the Democratic Republican Party over the competing Federalist Party. That governor's

name was L. Bridge gerry, spelled G-E-R-R-Y.

The Federalists were outraged, and according to Smithsonian Magazine, a Federalist dinner

party conversation led to the idea that the shape of one new district resembled a monster.

One guest, Elkana Tisdale, drew a long-necked, clawed monster over the map, causing another

guest to comment that it looked like a salamander. And then the poet Richard Alsopp commented

that, no, it was not a salamander, but a gerrymander, in honor of Governor Gary.

Other sources credit Federalist newspaper editors, including Nathan Hale, with inventing

the term, but either way, the cartoon appeared in the Boston Gazette and solidified the name

...