Politics and diplomacy

The fifth entry is a manipulação dos círculos eleitorais, five words for something English settles in one: « gerrymandering ». The Portuguese phrase describes the act — the boundaries of the constituencies have been bent — while the English word remembers the man who did it. In 1812 the governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, signed into law a redrawing of the state senate districts, and one of the new districts curled in a long thin arc around the north of Boston. A newspaper printed the shape with wings, a head and claws, called the creature a salamander, and somebody joined the governor’s surname to the tail of that word. « Gerrymander » has been doing duty as noun and verb ever since. Two things follow for a reader. The English word carries its accusation inside it, because it names a culprit, whereas a manipulação dos círculos eleitorais names only the operation and leaves the blame to the sentence around it. And the unit is named differently on each side: where English draws a constituency or a district, Portuguese draws o círculo eleitoral, a circle.