WHY DO WE SAY—?

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 196, 21 August 1933, Page 6

WHY DO WE SAY—?

" JERRY-BUILT HOUSES."

Any badly-constructed house is popularly described as being jerry built; and the man responsible is dubbed a jerry builder. But there is a good deal of uncertainty as to_who was the original Jerry thus to achieve .unenviable immortality, or in fact whether there was ever a real Jerry who was a bad builder at all. The first use of the term in the sense in which it is still applied is generally held to have occurred in Liverpool about a hundred years ago. This was at a time when strong complaints were being made about some newly-constructed houses. But there is no evidence that the offending builder was called Jerry, so, obviously, that was not the actual origin of the term; only its first application.

A theory that it arose from the Gaelic word Jerie, which meant something wretched or mean, is hardly tenable. Much more feasible is the suggestion that it simply arose from the fact that the personal name Gerry, or Jerry —which is quite a familiar surname, too —means giddy or unstable, and that thus this somehow suggested itself as a' fitting nickname for the type of person who erected very unstable homes. Yet what seems the most satisfactory account is that it came to us from America, and was just a contraction of another familiar phrase— gerrymandering. It is significant that the Jerry here was varied in transit, for the Yankee name was Gerry. This individual, who added one, if not two, phrases to current English speech, was Elbridge Gerry, who was Governor of Massachusetts and afterwards Vice-President of the United States towards the end of the eighteenth century. His astute electioneering mind devised a plan for so dividing up a State into districts for the choice of representatives that it would give the political party in power an. advantage over the other, even plough the latter may have a majority of votes in the States. An opposing Senator described one State so formed as being "so distorted in shape that it resembled a salamander." This idea yielded good political capital for the enemies of Elbridge Gerjy, and out of it grew the allusions to States affected by his plan as being ■ "Gerrymandered." We came to use the word gerrymandering as applying to almost any form of tampering or maladministration. Hence, from this corruption of the name to th c contraction which made Jerry a byword for shoddy or reckiess building docs not'seem a far cry. It is the explanation which most people- find convincing.