Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, it's easy in the English language to
Speaker 1: mix up words and phrases. Take it from someone who
Speaker 1: says words into a microphone for a living. One that
Speaker 1: often gets me is having read a word but never
Speaker 1: heard it aloud, and thus messing up the pronunciation. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the show for any amount of time,
Speaker 1: I am sure that you have heard me do this.
Speaker 1: But we have so many homophones and other sound alikes
Speaker 1: in English that our already confusing idioms can easily get misstated.
Speaker 1: After all, for all intentsive purposes, it is a doggy
Speaker 1: dog world out there. Ah, that should be for all
Speaker 1: intents and purposes, it is a dog eat dog world.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna nip this example in the bud, not the butt,
Speaker 1: and get to today's point. If something is put together,
Speaker 1: shall we say, interestingly, is it jury rigged or jerry rigged?
Speaker 1: This is one case where both are actually valid phrases.
Speaker 1: You can use them more or less interchangeably, but they
Speaker 1: do have slightly different meanings. A jury rigged refers to
Speaker 1: a clever but temporary solution to a problem. A something
Speaker 1: built quickly making use of whatever's on hand, whereas jerry
Speaker 1: rigged refers to something that was built hastily and poorly
Speaker 1: from the start. The two phrases have grown together in
Speaker 1: modern English use, but they have different enymological histories. The
Speaker 1: term jury rigged first caught on in these seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: where it was recorded in newspaper articles as a strictly
Speaker 1: nautical term. Jury in this case does not mean a
Speaker 1: group of people sworn to fairly decide the outcome of
Speaker 1: a court case or contest. At the time, the word
Speaker 1: jury could mean a group of people who judges something,
Speaker 1: but it could also describe something makeshift that had been
Speaker 1: improvised for temporary use, perhaps especially in a nautical emergency.
Speaker 1: The two homophones come from different roots. The judgment type
Speaker 1: of jury dates all the way back to a Latin
Speaker 1: word meaning to swear. The makeshift type of jury comes
Speaker 1: from the Middle English word jury, meaning improvised. In reference
Speaker 1: to sailing around the fourteen hundreds, a jury sail was
Speaker 1: a sail that had been repaired well enough to catch
Speaker 1: the wind and get you where you were going. The
Speaker 1: rigged in jury rig also originated in the fourteen hundreds
Speaker 1: and refers to the rigging of a boat or ship,
Speaker 1: you know, the ropes and braces that control the sails
Speaker 1: and support the masts of the vessel. So taken together,
Speaker 1: the phrase jury rigged, although nautical in origin, refers generally
Speaker 1: to a solution that repairs or replaces something well enough
Speaker 1: for now, I think mcgeiver. It's not fancy, but it works.
Speaker 1: And that's not exactly what jerry rigged means. It isn't
Speaker 1: well understood how the term jerry rigged originated, but okay,
Speaker 1: sometime in the mid eighteen hundreds, like the eighteen thirties
Speaker 1: to the eighteen sixties, were not totally sure. The term
Speaker 1: jerry built popped up, possibly around Lancashire in the north
Speaker 1: of England and maybe Liverpool or thereabouts. Jerry built described
Speaker 1: something that was built cheaply or crudely, without capability or finesse.
Speaker 1: It was an insult. It's thought to have originated in
Speaker 1: the masculine first name Jerry, but no one is sure how.
Speaker 1: And it's important to point out here that the English
Speaker 1: dismissive slang for German soldiers being jerry didn't crop up
Speaker 1: until World War One at least fifty years later, and
Speaker 1: is thought to be unrelated anyway. However, it came to
Speaker 1: be jerry built, and a related noun, jerrybuilder, entered the
Speaker 1: English language in the eighteen hundreds. From there, these words
Speaker 1: seem to have crossed paths with jury rigged, and this
Speaker 1: is probably how we got the term jerry rigged, meaning
Speaker 1: something built shodily or without a good plan, which is
Speaker 1: an important distinction from jury rigged. Something jury rigged might
Speaker 1: look silly but can actually be very clever and functional,
Speaker 1: but something jerry rigged looks silly and is silly. Today's
Speaker 1: episode is based on the article is it jury rigged
Speaker 1: or jerry rigged? On how stuffworks dot Com, written by
Speaker 1: Lori L. Dove. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in
Speaker 1: partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced by
Speaker 1: Time Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
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Speaker 1: your favorite shows.