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Last fall, I noticed that our shed was in imminent danger of collapsing into a pile of quaint barnboard. I made inquiries, and discovered that the barnboard market isn't what it was a few years ago, when Boulderites would pay fortunes for weathered lumber.
So I started making repairs -- fortifying joists and stringers, applying tar paper inside, installing another door. My carpenter friends said that hanging a door is the real test. After a long battle with shims, stop, trim, hinges, headers, cripples, mortises and the like, my door eventually swung freely and closed with a satisfying snap.
Proud of my work, I invited a carpenter over for an
inspection. His verdict was For jackleg work, that's not
bad.
For years, I've heard the term jackleg
applied to
carpentry that doesn't quite go by the book. Jackleg
is not exactly a term of honor, but is a homely and useful
term, and I wondered where it came from.
I immediately dismissed one explanation. I knew a guy in college named Jack Legg, and he claimed that the word came from his ancestors, all incompetent carpenters.
Two dictionaries (Random House and Webster II) say that
jackleg
first appeared in America about 150 years
ago. They say it is derived from the British slang,
blackleg,
which means a scab or strikebreaker.
Americans are fond of jack
-- witness
jackpot,
jacklight
and jackhammer.
Thus we got jackleg,
which originally meant a
scab. Presumably an unskilled jackleg replaced a skilled
tradesman during a labor dispute. Jackleg came to mean
someone without the proper skills, and thus a jackleg
lawyer or jackleg electrician.
But I have another theory. The first intricate mechanical contrivances in medieval Europe were clocks in public squares. They lacked dials, but indicated the time with chimes which were struck by a mechanical man who held a hammer.
According to Daniel J. Boorstin, former librarian of
Congress, this mechanical man was first known as
Jacquemart,
which comes from a shortened form of
Jacques combined with the French word for hammer,
marteau.
The whole thing got shortened to jack,
which came
to mean any tool that saves labor. Thus the
bootjack,
which saves labor when you're pulling off
a pair of stovepipes, or the bumper jack
which
simplifies lifting a car to change a tire.
Now, suppose you need to hold something up, such as a
door lintel, while you work around it. It needs a leg to
stand on.
Combine the generic-tool jack
with
this metaphorical leg,
and you've got a
jackleg
-- a temporary support. I have, in fact,
heard it used in just this way -- Go find me an 84-inch
jackleg.
A jackleg carpenter,
then, might be one who
leaves the jackleg -- a temporary expedient -- in place,
rather than finishing the job properly. Anything that is
just propped up, rather than put together the right way, is
the result of jacklegging. By extension, people who get the
job done, though not done well, are jacklegs doing jackleg
work.
Perhaps someone can enlighten us further. I'm still not
sure whether Not bad for a jackleg
is a compliment
or an insult.
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