I was reading a Lawrence Block novel yesterday and saw a common error with writers: getting jerry and jury confused. The gas cans on the rear of Jeeps and Land Rovers are jerry cans; a patched-together job or assembly is jury rigged. The misuse in the book was saying something was jerry-rigged.

The jerry part comes from the Brit’s WW-II term for Germans, as they were the first to use this type of gasoline/petrol container. I don’t know where the jury part comes from, other than it suggests a job done or designed by commitee.

This was hardly a punishable offense such as I feel it should be when catching a fiction writer from a country with no guns trying to describe correctly a revolver or pistol.

don’t forget that the british also use(d) the term ‘jerry-built’ to describe anything shoddily constructed.
i think the term comes from a victorian speculative builder in east london, whose poorly constructed houses became a byword for rip-offs

The history of both terms… is nicely described here:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-jur1.htm

I have always wanted to know why in W.W. II, the Brits called the Germans Jerrys?

Sorry to intrude here, but chiefly British slang "Jerry" probably from rather ethnographic "Ger(man)" which erudite sons of landed aristocrats & wealthy burgesses in Great Britain could well have eventually gotten while on seasonal grand tour of pastoral Italy and torrid Sicily, though only upon formal completion of some academic degree from those more celebrated institutions & universities of the late Stuart period to early Georgian empire: thus Tommy rot "Jerry" < colloquial Engl. "German" < mid-mod. Italian Germano instead of Parisian-Genevese Allemand "German" even long before political unification ever took its democratic hold over transalpine Germany proper, first under Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806 then Otto von Bismark in 1871.

It may also have stemmed from British envy of Germany’s technical superiority in the production of fuel containers at the time.  "We can’t do it, but Jerry can".

A jerry-rigged jeep was probably booby-trapped.

I think the term comes from a victorian speculative builder in east London whose poorly constructed houses became a byword for rip…offs

Thanks for the comment, mikalas,
and wecome to the agora/forum.

World reference. com lists jerry-rigged as shoddy workmanship.