IT was, said Stephen Kinnock MP, “a barefaced gerrymander.” According to Tristram Hunt, Labour’s former shadow education secretary and historian and broadcaster, “this boundary gerrymandering is grotesque”.

In the Guardian, commentator Owen Jones railed that it was “a ruthless gerrymandering of British democracy”, while Sedgefield’s own Phil Wilson put it most succinctly when he said it was a Conservative attempt “to gerrymander the system to give them a bigger majority over the Labour Party”.

Whatever you may think about the Boundary Commission’s plans to redraw the constituency map of the country and to lop off 50 seats, it was great to see the word “gerrymander” having its day in the headlines.

Even though we are all pronouncing it wrongly.

It derives from the name of the early 19th Century governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, who made a fortune as an exporter of dried codfish. He was not a fan of the British – he signed the Declaration of Independence – and so sided with Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party against the Federalist Party.

In 1812, his party officials redrew the boundaries of Massachusetts so that the Democratic-Republicans could win the most seats in the senate at the forthcoming elections – “redistricting”, the Americans called it at the time. It wasn’t a new practice, but it meant that some of the constituencies ended up with very unnatural shapes.

The editor of the Boston Sentinel newspaper, Benjamin Russell, pinned the new electoral map to his office wall, where it was spotted by portrait painter Gilbert Stuart. The shape of the new Essex County appealed to Stuart’s artistic eye, and he quickly drew on a head, wings and claws to turn it into a mythical dragon.

“That’ll do for a salamander,” he said.

“Better say a gerrymander,” replied Russell – and immediately began using his new word in print to expose the corrupt practices of the governor.

The word soon caught on, although Mr Gerry pronounced his surname with a hard g – as in “great”. However, as the word spread, people not personally familiar with Mr Gerry’s preferred pronunciation quickly changed it to “jerrymandering”, which is how, more than 200 years later, our politicians have been pronouncing it this week.

SHOULD the Boundary Commission changes go through, we’ll be down to 600 MPs – the lowest number, I think, since the 1800 Act of Union allowed the Scots some representation and so increased the number of MPs to 658. In 1918, the size of the Commons swelled to 707 MPs but in 1922, it was brought down to the 650 mark, around which it has hovered ever since.

Losing MPs may be no bad thing, but David Cameron created peers at a faster rate than any other Prime Minister in history, increasing the number in the House of Lords from 669 in 2000 to 826 today.

To be reducing the number of elected people at the same time as inflating the number of placed people is not gerrymandering, but it is undemocratic.

TALKING of dragons, I was speaking to the Durham Friendship Centre near Dragonville on the outskirts of Durham City on Tuesday. I’ve always been intrigued by the name “Dragonville” and was hoping to encounter French fire-breathing monsters.

I didn’t. It seems that for centuries there was a pub called the Dragon in the area. When a little mining settlement grew up in the 19th Century near the pub, it became known as Dragon Villa, just like there were nearby terraces named after local mineowners: Bell’s Villa and Carr’s Villa. It was just a small step from Dragon Villa to Dragonville.