{"id":721,"date":"2012-01-23T00:13:28","date_gmt":"2012-01-23T00:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/?p=721"},"modified":"2012-03-26T12:07:02","modified_gmt":"2012-03-26T11:07:02","slug":"word-appreciation-society-gerrymandering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/?p=721","title":{"rendered":"Word Appreciation Society: Gerrymandering"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Gerrymandering is the re-drawing of district lines in elaborate twisted ways to unfairly influence the weight of votes by district. It&#8217;s a cruel political move to dilute the power of demographic areas. In 1812, Governor Elbridge Gerry changed the shapes of districts to skew voting towards his political party. A newspaper commented that the new contorted shape looked like a salamander, and the term was coined.\u00a0Gerrymandering is an\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wordnik.com\/words\/eponym\">eponym<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and a\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wordnik.com\/words\/portmanteau\">portmanteau<\/a><\/em>\u00a0at the same time. Yeah. That is pretty awesome.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_723\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"width: 300px\">\n\t<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-723\" title=\"mount_lyell_salamander\" src=\"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/mount_lyell_salamander-300x147.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"147\" srcset=\"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/mount_lyell_salamander-300x147.jpg 300w, https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/mount_lyell_salamander.jpeg 941w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>\n\t<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gerry + salamander = Gerrymander<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking about eponyms and portmanteaus a lot recently, because I need a dissertation topic, and those two kinds of word formations make me happy. However, I can&#8217;t think of a specific question I could ask and answer in 4 months, and I haven&#8217;t found any great research as a jump-off point, so for now I&#8217;m just pleased to find a word that combines these two concepts.<\/p>\n<p><em>Appreciate a word today!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gerrymandering is the re-drawing of district lines in elaborate twisted ways to unfairly influence the weight of votes by district. It&#8217;s a cruel political move to dilute the power of demographic areas. In 1812, Governor Elbridge Gerry changed the shapes of districts to skew voting towards his political party. A newspaper commented that the new [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[422,566,225,382,51,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animals","category-eponyms","category-politics","category-portmanteaus","category-wordnik","category-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}