But our word expert, Martha Barnette, can explain the background to it for us.

Gerrymander is such a weird-sounding word, and it's weird because it combines the name of a real politician with this ridiculous imaginary monster.

And the real politician was a guy named Elbridge Gerry, G-E-R-R-Y.

And in 1812 he was the governor of Massachusetts, and he signed this legislation that redrew the voting districts in his state to keep his political party in power.

Now, redistricting, here in the States anyway, is, uh, accomplished by what they call packing and cracking.

And packing is when you redraw the lines of a voting district to crowd as many of the opposing party's voters as you can into one district.

So they win that one district in a landslide, but they lose every place else because the cracking part is when you take all those voters that you don't want to, to win and you split them up.

Our word expert, etymologist Martha Barnette, can tell us a bit more about the background to that term.

W- what is the show and what's the concept?

Well, A Way with Words is about language and how we use it, and that's all different kinds of, uh, language.

Slang.

It's about word origins.

It's about regional dialects, the funny things that y'all say in Vermont that we don't say here in California-

So that last bite, there is a name for that last piece of food, I guess?

Yeah, there's several different terms for that.

You know, imagine that you're in a restaurant and you order a key lime pie with two or three spoons for all the people around the table, and there's one bite left.

Talk about that.

Well, one thing that I like to point out to people, and people are often surprised to learn this, is that pronouns haven't remained stable in English throughout the centuries.

I mean, you were talking about English being related to German, um, and, and how they sound similar and, and, you know, I can't help thinking about the first lines of Beowulf, "Hwæt, we Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon." I mean, it, it sounds really weird.

English evolves, and language has evolved.

Pronouns have evolved as well because if you go way back to the time of Beowulf, there were a couple of different ways that you could say you.

I mean, think about the fact that we have you and then we, and you and ye, and we have thee and thou.

And originally, um, you was plural, and, uh, it started to be used in Middle English to be a more formal, uh, way of addressing somebody.

Hmm.

... start and, and, and dig in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's, um, that's pretty much what happened to me.

I just found it really challenging, and, um, rather than flunk the class and have that humiliation, I decided to drop it at the very last second.

But I made a promise to myself that I would go back home to Louisville, uh, that summer and find some starving graduate student who could tutor me in ancient Greek.

But, um, that embarrassment turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me, almost flunking that class, because I ended up studying with an elderly man from Latvia.

There's such a tender story you tell about the time surrounding Leonard's passing.

We're thinking about bread.

Yes.

We're thinking about the fact that bread is so fundamental in so many different cultures.

And in fact, there are some very old words for bread that show up in some surprising places in our language.

For example, Chris, if you invite company over for dinner, you're inviting them to break bread with you, right?

I like that.

that.But wait, there's more, because in medieval London, the Hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem was converted into an institution that housed people who were severely mentally ill.

And of course, as you can imagine, in that time, this was an incredibly grim place.

Mm-hmm.

And so I was about to flunk out of this class, and rather than flunk it, I dropped it, and I went home to, uh, my home in Louisville, Kentucky, and I found, uh, a tutor, an elderly man, an immigrant from Latvia, who spoke at least a dozen languages.

He was a polyglot and- and was perfectly comfortable in 12 languages and- and could work his way around in 12 more.

And he was a retired professor of classics, and he started to teach me about language in a completely different way, because Alison, I hadn't realized that nearly half of the world's population speaks a language that d-... that descended from a single prehistoric root called Proto-Indo-European.

And what that means is that languages that are really diverse and you wouldn't think have something in common actually do.

All of these languages came from that root, like Sanskrit and French and, and ancient Hittite and, um, and Russian and Irish and English and Spanish and Italian and German.

All these languages came from this one single root, uh, Tocharian, which was spoken in Western China.

Mm-hmm.

I, I didn't, I didn't think about that.

But any case, you're daring us to take a risk.

It actually comes from a corruption of an old Norse word, eggja, meaning to edge.

It's spelled E-G-G-J-A.

And so, the edge comes in there 'cause it's about driving someone to the edge of no return.

Hm.

... also the origin of our English word edge.

In fact, that word, eggja, still exists in Icelandic and Faroese, also descended from Old Norse, and in both of those languages, it can mean both to sharpen or to incite or instigate.