jerry-built / jury rig

1856 hand-colored lithograph of the HMS Dido returning to Tahiti on calm seas, port broadside view; jury rigged with jib, foresail, mizzensail, and a complete set of sails on main mast; two smaller crafts are in the background. The ship had been damaged in a hurricane on 21 January 1856.

1 March 2021

Jury rig and jerry-built are similar, but distinct, terms and often confused. Of the two, jury-rig is the older, but neither one has a definitive origin.

Jury rig is nautical in origin and comes from an older term: jury mast. It is thought to be a clipping of injury mast, that is a make-shift mast to replace a damaged one, a very plausible explanation but no record of the phrase injury mast has been found. Jury mast was in place by 1616, when John Smith used the phrase in a description of his second and unsuccessful attempt to travel to the New World:

But ere I had sayled 120 leagues, shee broke all her masts; pumping each watch 5 or 6000 strokes: onely her spret saile remayned to spoon before the wind, till we had reaccommodated a Iury mast, & the rest, to returne for Plimouth.

A popular song by George Alexander Stevens, written in 1757, uses the phrase and co-locates it with the verb to rig, a natural choice when discussing masts and sails:

On the lee-beam is the land boys,
            Let the guns o’er-board be thrown;
To the pumps, come every hand, boys,
            See! her mizzen-mast is gone.
The leak we’ve found, it cannot pour fast,
            We’ve lighten’d her a foot or more;
Up and rig a jury fore-mast,
            She rights! she rights! boys, wear off shore

We see jury rig by 1823 in a description of the 9 April 1804 battle between the British frigate Wilhelmina and the French frigate Psyché. The context is still nautical, but here there is no association with the ship’s rigging. Instead, jury rig refers to a makeshift disguise to make the British ship appear to be a merchantman in order to lure the French ship in unawares (a tactic that you see in every movie ever made about naval combat during the age of sail):

The jury-rig alone of an armée en flûte ship of war is a great deception; and it is always in the power of the officers and crew to give a mercantile appearance to her hull, in the case of the Wilhelmina in particular, she having been a dutch ship.

By 1864, jury rig was being used in contexts completely divorced from the sea. A letter by a William Newmarch to his mother on 4 December 1854, among other things, describes the operation of an unusual type of elevator:

The cage is lifted,—I should say operated,—by the pine tree or centre male worm being turned by a small steam engine,—the power required is not great. The advantage claimed is, that the cage cannot run away and fall down, as do some of the ordinary cages, suspended by chains or ropes, because the two worms work into each other, and the cage cannot slip down. There is, however, a disadvantage: if the engine breaks down while the cage is on its road between two stories, the cage must remain there until a jury rig is fixed to revolve the pine stem again.

The origin of jerry-built, on the other hand, is completely obscure. It refers not to a makeshift repair, but rather to a shoddy or haphazard construction in the first place. It has been suggested that it refers to a builder named Jerry who worked somewhere near Merseyside, England, but there is no evidence to support this conjecture. The term is first recorded in an 1869 glossary of the dialect of Lancashire, England:

Jerry-built, adj. slightly, or unsubstantially built.

Other than this early lexical entry, we have no evidence as to where the phrase comes from or who or what jerry refers to.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

James, William. The Naval History of Great Britain, vol. 3 of 5. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1823, 101n. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Newmarch, William Thomas. Letter, 4 December 1864. Letters Written Home in the Years 1864–65. London: 1880, 144. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. jerry-built, adj., jerry-builder, n., jury, adj., jury-mast, n.

Peacock, Robert Backhouse and J. C. Atkinson. A Glossary of the Dialect of the Hundred of Lonsdale. London: Asher & Co. for the Philological Society, 1869, 45. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Smith, John. A Description of New England. London: Humfrey Lownes for Robert Clarke, 1616, 49–50. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Stevens, George Alexander. “Song 207.” Apollo’s Cabinet, vol. 1. London: John Sadler, 1757, 292. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: Effingham J. Kellow, 1856, Royal Museums Greenwich. Public domain image.

incel

29 June 2018

Incel is a portmanteau of involuntary celibate, referring to a person, usually a heterosexual man, who desires a sexual or romantic partner but is unable to find one. The term arose as a self-identifier and spawned a virtual subculture as those people reached out for support on the internet. But over the years that subculture and the term itself morphed into one associated with violent misogyny. Ironically, however, the movement was started and the term incel was coined by a bisexual woman.

In 1993 an undergraduate, bisexual, woman named Alana (she remains anonymous) at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario created the website Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project. The website is no longer online, although snapshots of the site can be accessed through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. That website launch is apparently the first use of the phrase involuntary celibate. And sometime between 17 January – 20 April 1999 she posted an article to her site titled “The Incel Movement: What we can learn from the gay rights movement” that contained the sentence:

Society does not understand who we are, or have a name for our problem (in fact, straight incels are often assumed to be gay).

This is apparently the earliest use of the portmanteau incel. (The ambiguity in the date is a result of when the Internet Archive took its snapshots of the site. Alana’s web pages did not contain dates of publication.) Alana and the early incarnations of her site are in no way associated with the violent and misogynist nature of the incel movement today.

The term and the subculture remained largely unnoticed by mainstream media for the next fifteen years, as mainstream references to it are few and usually jocular, poking fun at those who cannot find partners. An article titled “Involuntary Celibacy: A Life Course Analysis” appeared in the Journal of Sex Research in 2001. And the New York Times published two articles in 2006 using the phrase, but not indicating that a subculture existed around the phenomenon. One by James Gorman published on 24 January 2006 said:

I don’t know where that happens in the brain, but I’m betting the graduate students are just going through periods of involuntary celibacy and trying not to be obvious about their desperation.

And a humor piece by Jeff Johnson from 5 June 2006 said offered this suggestion for a new internet domain name:

.cat The domain of choice for the involuntarily celibate.

The Urban Dictionary added an entry for incel on 8 March 2007, indicating that despite the paucity of its appearances in mainstream publications, the term was alive and well in various corners of the internet. The Urban Dictionary’s definition, however, also did not indicate the existence of any kind of subculture around the concept:

incel
involuntary celibate: someone who is celibate but doesn’t want to be
“He’s an incel. He tries to get dates every week but gets turned down all that time.”

The term came into the general public’s awareness with the shooting at Isla Vista, California on 23 May 2014, when a self-proclaimed incel named Elliot Rodger murdered six people and injured fourteen others before killing himself. The event caused the New York Times to use the portmanteau for the first time on 25 May:

He posted on sites where other young men shared their rages and frustrations at being virgins, and complained to classmates about the difficulty of meeting women. He referred to himself as an “INCEL,” short for “involuntary celibate.”

Since then, the term has entered mainstream discourse.

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Sources:

Donnelly, Denise, et al., “Involuntary Celibacy: A Life Course Analysis,” Journal of Sex Research, vol. 38, no. 2, May 2001, 159–69

James Gorman, “This Is Your Brain on Schadenfreude. Do You Feel Bad About Feeling Good?” New York Times, 24 January 2006, F3

Jeff Johnson, “Master of My Domain,” New York Times, 5 June 2006, A19

Peter Baker, “The Woman Who Accidentally Started the Incel Movement,” Elle, March 2016

Ian Lovett and Adam Nagourney, “Deadly Rampage in College Town After Video Rant,” New York Times, 25 May 2014

impeach / impeachment

21 December 2019

The verb to impeach has a straightforward and unsurprising etymology, but the noun impeachment has an unusual twist.

The English verb to impeach is a late fourteenth century borrowing from the Old French empechier. The French verb comes from the Latin impedicare, meaning to entangle or hinder. And the original meaning in English was the same. From the writings of John Wyclif, c. 1380:

He schal dwelle þere alle his lif, and no man enpeche hym.

Note that the Latin root is ped-, meaning foot, which is etymologically related to the English word fetter. But fetter comes down to us today via a different path, from the Old English feter. The difference between ped- and fet- is explained by Grimm’s law: the Indo-European /p/ changes to /f/ and the /d/ to /t/ in the Germanic languages, while they remain the same in Latin and the Romance languages. The root ped-, of course, means foot, and to fetter is to tie one’s feet.

But the Old French word has a second meaning, to accuse someone of a crime. And from the beginning, English also had this second, legal meaning. John Wyclif again:

Þat wickid men [...] þere schullen dwelle in seyntewarie, and no man empeche hem bi processe of lawe.
(That wicked men [...] should dwell there in sanctuary, and no man impeach them by process of law.)

Another sense of impeach that is often used in legal circles is to challenge, discredit, or disparage, as in to impeach a witness. This sense dates to at least 1600 when it appears in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II.4:

You doe impeach your modestie too much, To leaue the citie, and commit your selfe, Into the hands of one that loues you not

But the sense that it is most famous for, at least in American political circles, is to bring formal charges against a government official for, in the words of the U.S. constitution, “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” This sense arises out of English law and appears by 1569 in Richard Grafton’s Chronicle at Large and Meere History of the Affayres of Englande and Kinges of the Same:

Whether the Lordes and commons might without the kings will empeche the same officers and iustices vpon their offenses in the parliament or not.

Here is where it gets unusual. The noun impeachment follows a similar development of its senses, but it has a twist in its etymology. The Old French empeschment was borrowed back into Latin during the medieval era, where it appears as impechementum. This is an instance of Latin borrowing a word from a later language. Most French words stem from Latin, but you don’t often see it work in the other direction. Of course, Latin didn’t die with the ancient Romans. It continued on as a living language well into the early modern period, and like all living languages borrowed words from others.

In the United States, the House of Representatives has the sole power of impeachment of federal officials, that is the bringing of charges against an official, and the Senate is the tribunal that adjudicates the charges and, if found guilty, removes the official from office. Three presidents (Andrew Johnson, 1868; Bill Clinton, 1998; and Donald Trump, 2019) have been impeached and one (Richard Nixon, 1974) resigned before the House could impeach him. Fifteen federal judges have also been impeached, eight of whom were convicted by the Senate and removed from office with one resigning before the Senate could convict, the most recent conviction being in 2010.

One final note, many people use impeach to mean remove an official from office. Technically, impeachment is just the charges; removal requires a trial before the appropriate tribunal. This sense of impeach meaning remove from office isn’t in any of the standard dictionaries and is incorrect from a legal perspective, but linguistically it is a correct usage because so many people use it in this manner.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, s. v. impeach.

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2010, s. v. empescher.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. impeach, v., impeachment, n., fetter, n.

imp

24 September 2013

We all know that an imp is a small devil or demon, or somewhat more playfully, a mischievous child. But it was not always so. Would you believe that imp originally meant a shoot of a plant, a sapling?

Imp is an old word, dating to Old English, and back then an imp was a small plant. The word appears as early as c. 897 in King Alfred’s translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care. Alfred (reigned 871–99), concerned that there were not enough competent speakers of Latin in England to foster sound education and advancement of knowledge, embarked on a campaign of translating Latin works into English and sponsoring new scholarly works in the vernacular. Alfred is personally credited with translating several significant works, including this one by Gregory. In his translation of Pastoral Care, Alfred writes:

Sio halige gesomnung Godes folces, ðæt eardað on æppeltunum, ðonne hie wel begað hira plantan & hiera impan, oð hie fulweaxne beoð.
(That is the holy congregation of God’s people, which dwells in orchards, when they cultivate well their plants & their imps, until they are full grown.)

This is commentary on the Song of Solomon, 8:13, which reads:

Thou that dwellest in the gardens, the friends hearken: make me hear thy voice.

Old English also had a corresponding verb, impian, meaning to implant or graft the shoot of a plant. These botanic senses are now obsolete.

By the fourteenth century, imp had made the jump from flora to people and was being used to mean a child, especially the scion of a noble house. This transition can be readily seen in two examples, a few decades apart. The first, uses an extended metaphor of plant growth in reference to a prince. The poem The Death of Edward III, written c. 1377, says of Edward’s grandson, Richard II, who succeeded his grandfather when he was just ten years old:

Weor þat Impe ffully growe, Þat he had sarri sap and piþ, I hope he schulde be kud and knowe ffor Conquerour of moni a kiþ.
(Were that imp fully grown, so that he had pleasing sap and pith, I hope he should be famous and known as conqueror of many a nation.)

The anonymous poet’s hopes were not to be realized, as Richard II was a rather weak king. Compare that to this line about another prince written by Thomas Hoccleve c. 1411 in the envoy to his Regement of Princes, which lacks any overt botanical references:

O litell booke, who yafe the hardynesse Thy wordes to pronounce in the presence Of kynges Impe and princes worthynesse?
(Oh little book, who gave [you] the courage to pronounce your words in the presence of the king’s imp and the excellence of princes?)

Hoccleve’s poem was written for the prince who would become Henry V, who as a grown man would fulfill the earlier, anonymous poet’s hopes for a conqueror-prince.

It wasn’t until the sixteenth century that the word acquired its devilish connotation. It started to be used in phrases like “imp of a serpent” or “imp of the devil.” For example, a line in William Bonde’s 1526 Pylgrimage of Perfection reads:

Suche appereth as angelles, but in very dede they be ymps of serpentes.
(Such appear as angels, but in very deed they are imps of serpents.)

Such uses became so common that by the century’s end the qualifying phrase could be dropped and use of imp alone connoted demonic heritage. Reginald Scot’s 1584 The Discoverie of Witchcraft reads:

They haue so fraied vs with bull beggers, spirits, witches, [...] tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giants, imps.
(They have so frightened us with bull-beggars, spirits, witches, [...] tritons, centaurs, dwarfs, giants, imps.

That’s how a budding plant becomes a little demon.

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Sources:

“imp, n.,” imp, v.” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

“impe (n.),” Middle English Dictionary, 2001.

hurricane

29 August 2017

As of this writing, hurricane Harvey has devastated much of the Texas Gulf Coast. (Here in College Station, Texas, we’ve avoided the worst of it, although it would be an understatement to say there has been a lot of rain.) But where does the word hurricane come from? It turns out it’s a rather straightforward borrowing.

Hurricane comes to us from the Taino language of the Caribbean via Spanish. The Taino word is hurákan. It makes its first English language appearance in Richard Eden’s 1555 translation of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés’s 1535 summary of La historia general de las Indias (Eden included portions of Oviedo’s work, and the works of other authors, in his translation of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s Decadas del nuevo mundo):

Lykewyse when the deuyll greatly intendeth to feare theym, he threteneth to sende them great tempestes which they caule Furacanas or Haurachanas, and are so vehement that they ouerthrowe many howses and great trees.

Today, the official definition of a hurricane is a western-hemisphere tropical cyclone (i.e., forms over tropical or sub-tropical waters) with sustained winds of 64 knots (74 mph, 119 kph). Those with lower sustained winds are dubbed tropical storms. Hurricanes are classified into five categories of increasing severity based on windspeed, the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Category five is the worst, with sustained winds in excess of 137 knots (157 mph, 252 kph).

Before 1953, the names of individual hurricanes and tropical storms were arbitrary and unofficial. For instance an 1842 storm ripped the mast off the boat Antje and became known as Antje’s Hurricane. Saint’s names for storms that hit on the particular saint’s feast day were also common, but could be confusing if storms hit on the same day in multiple years. Beginning in 1953, names for storms were assigned by the U. S. National Weather Service. These names were originally all female ones. Eventually the responsibility for naming was transferred to the international World Meteorological Organization. In 1979, the WMO began alternating male names with female ones. The WMO currently maintains rotating lists of names used in different years and for different regions. When a storm is particularly devastating, the name is retired from the list and replaced. Recent retirees include Katrina (USA, 2005), Haiyan (Philippines, 2013), and Sandy (USA, 2012).

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2017, s. v. hurricane.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. hurricane, n.

“Tropical Cyclone Naming,” World Meteorological Organization, accessed 29 August 2017.

“What is a Hurricane,” U. S. National Ocean Service, accessed 29 August 2017.