Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Welcome back to my weekly series, Vocab 128, in which I sit down with pen and paper and write 128 words beginning with the same letter, in more or less the order that I think of them, before scanning the page and posting it here. The result is a flex of my vocabulary muscles, an exposure of my handwriting to the world, and perhaps an insight into the psychology of my word associations.

Generally, I avoid words that are merely alternate forms of other words, and when I think of such a word I generally default to the appropriate noun form. Proper nouns I exclude as a rule (but we’ll see how that goes once I get to X).

Sometimes you have to write a letter 128 times before you realize that it is a very strange shape.

I don’t think I made a single error this time, which makes me happy.

Just like C, the fact that G makes more than one initial sound makes it easy to fall into ruts where you forget about all the G words that don’t start with one sound. Maddening.

This week’s definition from American Heritage Dictionary:

ger·ry·man·der (jĕrē-măn′dər, gĕr-)

tr.v. ger·ry·man·dered, ger·ry·man·der·ing, ger·ry·man·ders

To divide (a geographic area) into voting districts in a way that gives one party an unfair advantage in elections.

n.

1. The act, process, or an instance of gerrymandering.

2. A district or configuration of districts whose boundaries are very irregular due to gerrymandering.

[After Elbridge Gerry + (SALA)MANDER (from the shape of an election district created while Gerry was governor of Massachusetts).]

Word History: In 1812, as governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry signed a bill authorizing the revision of voting districts in his state. Members of Gerry’s party redrew them in order to secure their representation in the state senate, and out of Gerry’s home county, Essex County, they carved an unlikely-looking district with the shape of a salamander. According to one version of the coining of gerrymander, the shape of the district attracted the eye of the painter Gilbert Stuart, who noticed it on a map in a newspaper editor’s office. Stuart decorated the outline of the district with a head, wings, and claws and then said to the editor, “That will do for a salamander!” “Gerrymander!” came the reply. The image created by Stuart first appeared in the March 26, 1812, edition of the Boston Gazette, where it was accompanied by the following title: The Gerrymander. A New Species of Monster, which appeared in the Essex South District in Jan. 1812. The new word gerrymander caught on instantly—within the same year gerrymander is also recorded as a verb. (Gerry’s name, incidentally, was pronounced with a hard (g) sound, although the word which has immortalized him is now commonly pronounced with a soft (j) sound.) Gerry ran for reelection in 1812, and popular outrage directed at the flagrant use of the technique we now call gerrymandering doubtless played a role in his defeat.