If you set off on your horse from Salem, Massachusetts, up to Salisbury, a direct route would take you through Rowley and Newbury and over the Merrimack River, not way around through Andover. But in 1812, Governor and soon-to-be Vice President Elbridge Gerry signed an apparently egregious redistricting bill that allowed his Democratic-Republican party to take state Senate seats it couldn’t get with more reasonably shaped districts. The resulting malformed district included Salisbury, Andover, and Salem, but looped awkwardly around Rowley and its environs. The shape it described was so awkward that illustrator Elkanah Tisdale mockingly drew claws and an eye over a map to represent it as a kind of reptilian monster. At a dinner party for prominent Massachusetts Federalists, according to lore, someone remarked that it looked like a salamander. “No, a Gerry-mander!” teased the poet Richard Alsop.
Every since, when district limits are reshaped more politically than geometrically reasonably in America, it’s been called gerrymandering.
We don’t usually think about the meaning of words as shapes, like voting districts. But consider the etymology of “definition.” “De” is just a Latin prefix that verb-ifies something. “Finis” is Latin for “end” or “boundary.” And so, like drawing or redrawing districts, to define a word fundamentally means to draw a line surrounding all the concepts it does refer to or mean and to exclude all the stuff the word doesn’t mean. Etymologically speaking, a word with a simple intentional definition would be like a district that’s a regular geometric shape. Terms with more complicated definitions might have weirder shapes, so as to include some far-off concept that has come under the meaning of the word and exclude some of the things around it. This is hard, and for concision, dictionaries compromise between long, overly precise definitions and simpler, clearer ones that may leave some border disputes.
Language evolves, populations change, and some districts, like some definitions, can’t be defined within a simple shape. That’s OK. But when politics gets involved, as we learned in 1812 Massachusetts, you get egregiously awkward shapes in redistricting. In defining, it’s the same. When political activism takes the lead, meanings get stretched and misshapen by people who care more for sloganeering and propaganda than for what words actually mean and how they’re used. If a word is negative, lexical activists may want to include what they hate and exclude what they support, or vice versa. So if you draw the definition of political terms — if you “de”-“fines” them — you often end up with something salamander-like, and just as slippery.
