most accounts of the origin of jerry mannering traced back an individual, all who had a very long and impressive and storied career in american politics. guy by the name of gary and, the pronunciation of elbridge gary's last name, of course, lends us term gerrymandering, or, as it was pronounced for around about the first 50 years that the term was use gerrymander. and when was researching the book, i was actually able to uncover the first historical reference to gerrymandering being pronounced with a soft g as gerrymandering as opposed to the original hard g and this is difficult to do because obviously when you go back that far in history, we don't have recordings of people actually saying anything. so i set out to look for the earliest possible historical reference to how the word was actually pronounced and i found that in the transcripts of the constitutional convention of the state of indiana in the mid-19th century, and one of the delegates whose name john pettit, which coincidentally actually the name of one of my ancestors, was a british navy lieutenant and privateer, i think