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I think the subject says it all. I've heard the phrase a million times, sometimes 'jerry-rigging.' And my questions are simple...who was Jerry? Or who was on the jury? How did we get such a screwy synonym for 'improvised.'
In the immortal words of Cecil Adams, "The next time we invent a language, somebody's gotta take better notes."
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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according to AHD:
From jury-rig, jury-rigging, improvised rigging on a ship, modeled on
jury-mast, temporary mast, perhaps ultimately from Old French ajurie, help,
from aider, to help.
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I understood this to have a nautical origin (it is used a lot in O'Brian and Forester's novels about the British Navy - if a pseudo-YART may be expressed here), coming from a jury-mast, used to temporarily replace a mast that has been shot through by cannon or otherwise rendered useless. Here's what I found in the American Heritage Dictionary:
From jury-rig, jury-rigging - improvised rigging on a ship, modeled on jury-mast, temporary mast, perhaps ultimately from Old French ajurie, help, from aider, to help.
Postscript: ARGHHAGH! Beaten to it by tsuwm by 72 seconds! Story of my life.
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Carpal Tunnel
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"Jury rigging" is a very old sailor's term for an emergency repair, an expedient intended only to get the ship to a safe harbor where a proper permanent repair can be made.Its origin is obscure.
"Jerry-built" I have heard for defectively built houses
After seeing tsuwm/s post, I think there is merit in attributing it to the French word given for "jury".
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My brother in law has the surname German and is a builder, which brings the same joke every time about jerry building.
Is the derivation of Jerry=German from GERman, or something subtler?
Rod Ward
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Being from a seafaring area I've always been clear on jury rigging but how about jerry-built?
I know it means shabbily done or built to sell but not to last very long... but perhaps you have a different meaning ?
I often hear the two flip-flopped ... and jury-built used instead of jerry-built.
Is it perhaps because jury-rigged sounds more like you have tried to tamper with an empanelled jury?
wow
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Here's what the Word Detective has:
---------------------------------
Caught in the rigging.
Dear Word Detective: I'm curious about the word "jerryrig," as in to make do with materials on hand. I recently saw it spelled "juryrig," but the context seemed to be the same. Is the correct spelling "jerry" or "jury" and what is the origin of the word? What, if anything, does it have to do with a rigged jury? -- Jill Fitzpatrick, via the Internet.
Not much, if anything. Then again, some of the juries running around out there these days could probably do with a little jury-rigging, perhaps a little money under the table for paying attention to the simple facts of the case. Between turning certain people loose in the face of mountains of evidence and fining other folks millions of dollars for lying on their job applications, juries are rather rapidly reaching a level of credibility formerly attained only by UFOlogists and mail-order psychics.
In any case, the "jury-rig" (it is usually hyphenated) you're asking about has nothing whatever to do with juries in the judicial sense. "Jury" was originally a naval term for any makeshift contrivance substituting for the real thing in an emergency, most commonly found in the term "jury-mast," a temporary mast constructed in place of one that had been broken. There's some debate about where the word "jury" in this sense came from, with the leading (but unverified) theory being that it was short for "injury."
To say that something is "jerryrigged" is to mix idioms a bit, because the proper term is "jerrybuilt." A "jerrybuilder," a term dating to 19th-century England, was originally a house builder who constructed flimsy homes from inferior materials. The "jerry" in the term may have been a real person known for the practice, or may be a mangled form of "jury," as in "jury-rigged." I tend to think that "jerrybuilt" arose separately from "jury-rig" simply because their senses are slightly different. Something that is "jury-rigged" is concocted on the spur of the moment to meet an emergency, but something "jerrybuilt" is deliberately constructed of inferior materials to turn a quick buck.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Dear Rod: In WWII, "Jerry" was US Army slang for the krauts.
But they had a very useful sturdy container for motor vehicle fuel, which we very much admired, copied, and called a "jerry can".
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Pooh-Bah
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On the "authority" of the movie "Five Graves to Cairo," the derogatory "[J]erry" was given the Germans by the Brits on whose maps "Germany" was abbreviated "Ger'y"
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Another term I am fond of for cheap, poor quality construction work is to call something a "cob-job" (from "to cobble", I assume). Cob-job also tends to be verbed, as in: "Boy, somebody really cobbed these cabinets in here."
Flatlander
ps. Anyone know what a "deadman" is in construction parlance? Answer will follow.
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