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Welcome to Brain Stuff, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, Brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here.

It's easy in the English language to mix up words and phrases.

Take it from someone who says words into a microphone for a

living. One that often gets me is having read a word but never heard it aloud and thus

messing up the pronunciation. If you've been listening to this show for any amount of time,

I am sure that you have heard me do this. But we have so many homophones and other sound-alikes in English that

our already confusing idioms can easily get misstated. After all, for all intensive purposes,

it is a doggie dog world out there. Ah, that should be for all intents and purposes. It is a dog-eat-dog world.

I'm going to nip this example in the bud, not the butt, and get to today's point. If something is

put together, shall we say, interestingly, is it jury-rigged or jerry-rigged?

This is one case where both are actually valid phrases. You can use them more or less interchangeably,

but they do have slightly different meanings. Jury-rigged refers to a clever but temporary

solution to a problem, something built quickly, making use of whatever's on hand.

Whereas jerry-rigged refers to something that was built hastily and poorly from the start.

The two phrases have grown together in modern English use, but they have different etymological histories.

The term jury-rigged first caught on in the 1700s, where it was recorded in newspaper articles as a strictly nautical term.

Jury, in this case, does not mean a group of people sworn to fairly decide the outcome of a court case or contest.

At the time, the word jury could mean a group of people who judges something, but it could also describe something makeshift that had been improvised for temporary use, perhaps especially in a nautical emergency.

The two homophones come from different roots. The judgment type of jury dates all the way back

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