The House That Jerry Built May Not Last

Pity poor Jerry. Or Gerry, for that matter.

Thanks to the English language, men or women with these otherwise noble names are forever associated with slipshod construction or political manipulation.

If a house or machine or law is jerry-built, it is put together sloppily and carelessly. Remember the makeshift shelf in your uncle’s garage supported on one end by his tackle box and on the other by a hanging rope? Was your uncle, by any chance, named Jerry?

Language buffs have stumbled all over themselves trying to find the origin of jerry-built. A whole team of editors from the “Oxford English Dictionary” once swarmed over the headquarters of a British construction company reputed to do shoddy work, thinking they might find the origin of the term, but the team left empty-handed before the office collapsed.

Other etymologists have speculated that jerry is shorthand for Jericho, with its tumbling-down walls. Still others believe it comes from the French root jour (day), suggesting that something poorly made might stand for only a day.

The most likely explanation is that jerry-built is an adaptation of jury-rigged, a nautical term for a temporary, or emergency, arrangement of a ship’s sails. This takes your hapless Uncle Jerry off the hook but leads to confusion with rigged juries, those courtroom panels selected to be partial to one side or the other.

Jerry-built is sometimes confused with gerrymander, which means to shape the boundaries of a legislative district so it includes a majority of voters favorable to a particular candidate or party.

The term comes from U.S. politician Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814), who, as governor of Massachusetts, slyly redrew the state’s U.S. congressional districts to favor his own Democratic-Republican Party. One of the new districts snaked so obviously and awkwardly across half the state that it looked like a huge salamander. Soon the compound word gerrymander was coined to describe this politically motivated monstrosity.

Can a gerrymandered district be jerry-built? Usually is.