jerrybuild

jerrybuild

English

Verb

jerrybuild (third-person singular simple present jerrybuilds, present participle jerrybuilding, simple past and past participle jerrybuilt)

1. (transitive) To assemble a project in a hasty, sloppy manner, especially using cheap, inferior or improvised materials.
   • 1938, Xavier Herbert, Capricornia, New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1943, Chapter IX, p. 154-5,

     It was a queer-looking hovel, built of galvanised iron and kerosene-cans and bark and saplings and bamboo, according to no definite plan, and obviously, to knowing eyes, by one of those masters of the craft of jerry-building […]

   • 1968, Barbara Hardy, Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative Imagination, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, Chapter 2, p. 49,

     If we look at some of the stories of R. D. Laing's patients in The Politics of Experience it looks as if schizophrenia jerrybuilds a shaky structure of passion and freedom which depends for existence on negation of control and conscious scruple.

   • 1999, John Vernon, A Book of Reasons, New York: Houghton Mifflin, Chapter III, p. 110,

     Evolution, for example, isn't rational—and it jerry-builds our bodies.

   • 2012, Jerry White, A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century, Harvard University Press, 2013, Part One, Chapter I, p. 28,

     Little wonder that corners were cut, bad materials made do for good and jerry-building was one of the curses of the age.

2. To assemble a structure in such an unsafe manner that it is doomed to collapse.
3. To repair a structure in a sloppy or unsafe manner.

See also

• jerryrig