Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Merely going through a phrase

A customer was in the shop the other day talking about a slide guitar she'd recently acquired. There was something about the resonator, I think it was, that she wasn't crazy about, but she liked the rest of the instrument well enough that she declared she would jury rig a replacement. Jury rig. There's a rare one! It is a nautical term--my 1948 copy of Knight's Modern Seamanship (I knew it would come in handy someday!) uses "jury" as an adjective in several entries. A jury mast, for example, is "a temporary mast. . ." a jury anchor is "a heavy weight used as an anchor". A jury rig (a noun in Knight's) is "a makeshift rig". Nicholl's Seamanship and Nautical Knowledge has a very intriguing paragraph on jury rudders, which are pretty much anything you can come up with, if you should have the misfortune to loose the original rudder. When I can't think of a real blog entry, I have to jury rig one.

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