“The new circumstances under which we are placed,” Thomas Jefferson remarked in a letter to John Waldo in 1813, “call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects” (JLA, 1295–6). For Jefferson, an unfixed relationship between words and meanings and the unsettling linguistic process of neologization (his word) were incumbent upon Americans if they were to hold the mirror up to nature and suit their words to their actions. Creating the American system of government alone demanded transformations in political discourse. The framers of the Constitution borrowed from the past, but they also recognized that their project required them to formulate a new lexicon for politics, one that would accommodate a neologism for a political system that could not be denominated with the word “monarchy,” aristocracy,” or “democracy” or even solely with the word “national” or “federal.” Much of the difficulty in formulating the Constitution arose, as James Madison reports in Federalist No. 37, from a want of terms and the inadequacy of language, and in 1824 Madison writes: “New ideas, such as presented by our novel and unique political system, must be expressed either by new words, or by old words with new definitions” (JML, III, 435).