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.