Pronunciation of Gerrymander

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. This is Clara calling from New York.

Glad to have you here. What’s up?

I wanted to ask you guys about gerrymandering because I recently learned that the person who it’s named after pronounced his name Gary.

And I wonder why we never said gerrymandering.

Oh, interesting.

And so I’m assuming that they told you that it was originally named for Elbridge Gerry.

So that I knew that it was named and it looked like a salamander.

That’s right. Yeah.

I disagree. I think it looks more like a dragon.

Yeah, yeah. What happened was Elbridge Gerry was the governor of Massachusetts back in the early 1800s.

And they did this redistricting to keep his party in power.

And it was really kind of laughable.

If you could see a picture of it, you would see that these districts in eastern Massachusetts just form what looks sort of like a snake.

Very sinuous.

Yeah, it’s really kind of ridiculous.

The story goes that a cartoonist added a head and eyes and wings and sort of made it look like this scary monster.

And the word salamander was sometimes used for a mythical beast.

And so.

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Yeah. And so it was designed to look like a salamander.

I mean, a salamander being a mythical beast in this cartoon.

And somebody said, there’s a salamander for you.

And somebody said, no, it’s a garymander, referring to the governor who had wrought this kind of silly redistricting.

And so for a long time, you were asking, why don’t people say garymander?

And indeed, for a long time, they did say garymander.

Really?

Yeah, yeah.

And that pronunciation changed over time, I think, as the governor became less well-known.

And also the word itself was transmitted not by sound but in print.

Okay.

Gary Mander.

Yeah, you were more likely to learn it from a newspaper or some learned journal than you were from somebody talking to you at the bar or at church or something like that.

Yeah.

That’s funny because I realized this or I thought of this when I heard you guys talking about the Carnegie episode.

Right.

There we go.

Perfect.

Oh, yeah.

Instead of Carnegie, Carnegie.

One of the ways that we know that it was pronounced as gerrymander is because a few places in the printed record,

People talk specifically about this pronunciation of the word.

And there’s a particularly wonderful part of a document from 1850.

It’s Proceedings for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of Indiana.

And one of the participants says, you are constantly gerrymandering the state or gerrymandering,

As I maintain the word should be pronounced, the G being soft.

So we know by the way he’s phrased that that everyone else is saying gerrymander at the time, but he believes it should be gerrymander.

And if we had a time machine, I would go back and tell him he turned out to be right.

That’s so funny.

How about that?

I had no idea.

Well, I’ve decided to take it back and start saying gerrymander.

Oh, you are going to say gerrymander.

But now you’re going to have to explain it to everyone.

They’re going to correct you or just not correct you and think that you’ve got it wrong.

Yeah, and that I think is funny.

All right.

Yeah, and you can tell them this story.

I mean, it’s interesting that governor went on to have a longer political career.

He was a vice president to James Madison.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, of course, because he gerrymandered his women, right?

Well, I understand.

But he lost one of his elections, so it didn’t work very long.

Well, thank you so much.

Thank you for a timely question.

Rock on with your bad self.

Thank you for calling.

I really appreciate it.

Have a good day.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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