Jerry-Rigged

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Thank you. This is Sean calling from Parish City, Michigan.

Hi, Sean. Welcome to the program.

I have a question about rigging things.

I’ve heard this three different ways.

I’ve heard jury rig, I’ve heard jerry rig,

And I used to work in a travel agency with an IT department,

And a man who used to say Gary rigged.

Gary rigged?

Yes, and I was convinced for the longest time,

And this is going to make me sound like an idiot,

That there was a gentleman named Gary who worked in the IT department who could fix anything.

There wasn’t, but I was totally convinced of it.

So you’re always waiting for Gary, huh?

Yes. I was like, can you just send the guy already?

And he never showed up. That’s great.

No, he never showed up.

Well, as far as I know, the jury rigged is an old expression that goes back to a jury mast,

Which was a makeshift mast on a boat.

And if your mast broke or you lost it somehow, it was replaced by something called a jury mast.

It may come from an old French word that means to help.

But then jerry-rigged comes along and there’s also jerry-built.

Yeah, which is a little different.

Yeah, which kind of influences, I think, the jerry-rigged.

Yeah, they kind of like start to blend, right?

Yeah.

So in other words, Martha, this is hundreds of years old, right?

The jury-rigged.

There’s this jerrymast. You might lose your mast of your ship in a storm and have to replace it with something that wasn’t really meant for the job, right?

Right.

And so that’s the jerrymast?

That would be, yeah. And you would refer to that as jerryrigging, which is a noun, and then that became a verb.

So you would jerryrig anything, not just a mast. You might jerryrig a patch for the side of the boat or something ashore.

Or your pants, for that matter. Okay.

And then, Shonda, what happens is it leaves the nautical world.

Around the 1840s or so, we start to see this description in British newspapers of houses being jerry built, J-E-R-R-Y.

And what this means is kind of a shoddy construction or that they’ve been made of tar paper and scrap lumber, the kind of thing that burns really easily.

And this begins to have its own life.

And before too long, we end up with these two really strong terms in English

That a lot of people think are interchangeable.

The jury rigged and jerry built.

And jerry built and jerry rigged kind of coexist for a long time.

And then people begin to confuse them and mesh their meanings together

And mess their uses together.

And now for a lot of people, the jerry from jerry built goes with the rig of jury rigged.

Does that make a lot of sense?

Not at all.

It’s fascinating.

Not at all, but it’s fascinating.

The brief summary of it is that people made a muddle of English.

Who’d have thunk it?

Ha! Darn them people!

But what it is, there’s such a long history in all of these different forms of this word,

And it all hinges, as far as I’m concerned, on that sound of jury or jerry.

There’s such a long history.

There’s plenty of time there for people to confuse these and to make a muddle,

And even to borrow them intentionally for new uses.

It’s not just all accidental or wrong-headed.

Sometimes there’s people do this because we’re English speakers.

We like to take words and repurpose them and put them to new work.

Right.

So you have jury rig, which means sort of makeshift.

It’s sort of a workaround, I guess you would say, in the IT world.

And then you have jerry built, which is shoddy, crummy workmanship, right?

Yeah.

And so what about Gary?

Who is Gary?

No.

Who is Gary?

I have to say, I’ve never heard that.

None of my dictionaries have a thing about that.

I think there are a few jokes you might find online where people use it,

And a couple things were just patently wrong.

Whoever was using that in your office was either making a joke

Or doesn’t know how to read.

Oh, well, and that’s very possible.

So you asked around your office?

Yeah, and nobody had any history of anyone named Gary ever even working there.

He’s a figment of somebody’s imagination there, I think,

Unless we get all these emails and phone calls from listeners

Telling us that they know who Gary is.

Oh, sure.

And if we find out, we’ll let you know, Sean.

That would be fantastic.

Okay.

Well, cool.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks for talking to me.

Appreciate it.

Have a great day.

Bye-bye.

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