A WORD, PLEASE — gerrymander

continuity: Next, Professor Aubrey Vellum, with a map that grew wings and claws.

the verdict: Every so often you'll hear someone accused of gerrymandering, which means drawing the lines on a voting map so cleverly that an election is half-won before anyone votes. It's a funny, bouncy word for something so sneaky. And there's a monster hiding inside it.

a word, please: Gerrymander. A word, please.

the crack: Picture Boston in eighteen twelve. The party running Massachusetts redrew the state Senate districts, and up in Essex County they carved out one long, curling district shaped to squeeze out the votes of their rivals, the Federalists. People looked at that map and saw an animal. It looked just like a salamander, the little lizard-like creature. Now, the governor at the time was a man named Elbridge Gerry. So a Federalist satirist, someone on the losing side with a sharp pen, stuck the two together and called it the Gerrymander. On March twenty-sixth, eighteen twelve, the Boston Gazette printed it as a cartoon by the artist Elkanah Tisdale. The district had become a winged, clawed beast crawling across the map.

the collision: People love to say the word comes from Gerry plus meander, because the lines wind and wander. It's a lovely guess, and it isn't true. The real story has a monster in it, which is much better. And here's the part that makes me grin. Gerry didn't even like that map, and he only signed it reluctantly. His party won the Senate anyway, he lost his own election a few weeks later, and his name stayed welded to the beast forever. We even say it differently than he did. He said his name with a hard G, gheh-ree, but the word went soft. So one newspaper joke about one county became the word we still reach for, more than two hundred years later, whenever someone bends a map to win.

the glimmer: Give a sneaky trick a good name, and everyone can point at it. That's why one cartoonist's joke has been standing guard over fair elections for two centuries.

the exit: That's the word. Next time you see a map with a strange shape, look for the claws.