jerry-built

jerry built

Shoddily constructed. Hyphenated if used before a noun. The origin of the term is unknown. You could tell house was jerry built. It looked like it would blow over in a strong wind! Yeah, you didn't fool Mom for a second with that jerry-built story you concocted.
See also: built, Jerry
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

jerry-built

mod. carelessly and awkwardly built. The lawyer’s case was jerry-built, but the jury bought it anyway.
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions
See also:
  • Jerry
  • jerry built
  • round robin
  • a round robin
  • eleventh hour
  • dooper
  • black market
  • a light touch
  • wiggy
  • first hand
References in periodicals archive
Manicured lawns and ranch homes gradually replace South Gate's jerry-built homes and chicken coops; residents enjoy the benefits of new federal housing and infrastructure programs and Los Angeles' postwar industrial boom.
"Jerry-built" refers to anything hastily and haphazardly constructed, and while there's some controversy concerning its origin, its most plausible derivation is nautical.
Herewith a few examples of Wills's own jerry-built contrivances.
Outdoor jobs no longer require a jerry-built arrangement of extension cords the farther you get from the house.
No running water, no rations, jerry-built humpies, no school for kilometres, not much work -- and no manager.
Too many attractive Web sites are just nice facades on jerry-built structures, he added.
The policy of gradual economic opening adopted after the 1973 coup is described as the product of a "fragile, tension-laden, jerry-built coalition" (p.
Wanamaker's devotion to the theatre of Shakespeare took root in another visionary moment, when he saw a play performed on a jerry-built replica of the Globe at the 1935 Chicago World's Fair.
The resulting jerry-built portables powered everything from streetlights to vaccine refrigerators.
It seems likely - as suggested in a dust-cover blurb - that one or more of the jerry-built models outlined in Chapters 2-6 of the Hahn and Solow volume will interest some economists.
The chapter on Mochtar Lubis is unworthy of serious regard: a jerry-built confection organised around list-making and given to explaining plot and character to readers imagined as feebleminded or illiterate or perhaps just a lazy mob; in any event quite incapable of discerning the rudiments.
But it makes perfect sense within the context of a crusade, where reasons and arguments are jerry-built to justify the quest, where catsup is a vegetable, as Reagan famously claimed, if it gets you any closer to the Grail.
As it was, the nation plunged into the rationalization of its ratlier jerry-built nineteenthcentury manufacturing establishment; in the conversion of the steel industry from cutthroat competition and overproduction in marginally efficient plants to "cooperation," as Morgan called it, he had the dedicated assistance of men like Robert Bacon, George Perkins, and Charles Steele.
The foundations might have been solid but his tarte au citron was jerry-built, with judge Paul Hollywood displaying a merciless streak as he added the cherry on top: "How the mighty fall."
THIS PAST JUNE, a sprawling, jerry-built plywood protrusion sprang up in the middle of a South Bronx housing project with the suddenness of a mushroom patch after a spring rain.