So I've been reading the Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian, and came across an interesting usage: jury-rig, in its current meaning of an improvised system cobbled together from spare parts. I had heard that this was originally a WWII slang, coined by the British, and was actually the anti-German Jerry-rig. I've even taught myself to say kludge instead of jury-rig, due to the latter term's nationalist origin. (Likewise I stopped saying gyp to mean "cheat" when I found out it referred to the Gypsies.)
In any case, this word turning up in the Aubrey_Maturin series throws a new light on it. O'Brian seems to have been a fairly thorough researcher; I'd be more than a little surprised if he used such recent slang --only 25 years old when the first books were written -- in a historical novel. And he uses jury-rig a lot: three times in Post Captain alone.
I just looked up jury-rig in Wikipedia, which says that the word is a nautical term from the 19th century and gives 3 possible etymologies. (My favorite is from the French du jour, meaning "of the day" or by extension, "temporary.') It also debunks the WWII origin I had heard. Learn something new every day!
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The OED has "jury-mast" for a temporary mast used to replace a damaged one (possibly from "injury-mast") going back as 1618, and assumes that "jury-rig" comes from the action of rigging the jury-mast.
The oldest meaning of "jury" is indeed "temporary"--a legal jury is an ad hoc body. Don't know if the French origin is valid, but it sounds good to me. Of course, "de jure"--"of the law"--could also have lead to "jury".
I think the WWII origin is a conflation of "jury-", which is sometimes spelled "jerry-", with "Jerry-can", which was the Tommy term for the design of water container that Nazis used in North Africa; it was better than anything the Brits had, so they stole them whenever possible and then stole the design.
I've seen people argue that "gyp" isn't from "Gypsy", but instead from "gippo" (spelled various ways), a type of tunic that somehow became associated with thievery, possibly just by association with lower-class workers. http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/cloth/glossary.html confirms that it's a type of tunic.
Re the term "Jerry": This was used in the U.K. to mean "German" in the 1930s, and I'm sure it was in use in the British Army in WW1. Germans were often referred to as "The Jerries". The term "Jerry built" was also used in the U.K. in the 30s to refer to poorly built cheap houses, and here it was probably derived from jury built.
The only way we use it in Idaho is the spare parts definition. I had no idea it even had another meaning because all my Dad use to say was, "Just Jury-Rig It Son".
Screw all this learnin’ stuff, to me it will always mean fix it with whatever you have laying around.
i had heard growing up that here in central Texas, jerry-rigging was a term used to refer to something done cheaply or halfway because many of the Scots Irish settlers felt that the German settlers (who were "Other") were cheap and would not do things properly.