Jury-rig for a verb; kludge for a noun or verb
Jury-rig (v.)
To erect, construct, or arrange in a makeshift fashion. M-W
To assemble quickly or from whatever is at hand, especially for
temporary use:
To jury-rig stage lights using automobile headlights. dictionary.com
Using the verb for anything makeshift may be more AmE. The OED limits it to nautical usage:
Jury, adj.
I. Compounds.
- Nautical. Used in combination to designate parts of a ship put together or contrived for temporary use. Categories
a. jury-rig n.
b. jury-rig v.
c. jury-rigged adj.
Etymology
The phrase 'jury-rigged' has been in use since at least 1788. The
adjectival use of 'jury', in the sense of makeshift or temporary, has
been said to date from at least 1616, when according to the 1933
edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language, it appeared
in John Smith's A Description of New England. It appeared in
Smith's more extensive The General History of Virginia, New-England,
and the Summer Isles published in 1624.
Two theories about the origin of this usage of 'jury-rig' are:
• A corruption of jury mast; i.e., a mast for the day, a temporary mast,
being a spare used when the mast has been carried away. From French
jour: 'a day'.
• From the Latin adjutare: 'to aid'; via Old French
ajurie: 'help' or 'relief'. Wikipedia
jury-rig; jerry-build; jerry-rig; gerry-rig. The first is an authentic nautical phrase, dating from the early 17th century. Derived
from jury-mast (= temporary replacement for a ship's broken mast),
the jury part here has nothing to do with 12 peers deciding
someone's fate. Instead, according the Barnhardt's Dictionary of
Etymology, it probably derives from the Old French word ajurie ( =
help) ... Garner's Modern English Usage (2009)
For a modern noun, we have
Kludge or kluge (n)
A haphazard or makeshift solution to a problem and especially to a
computer or programming problem
Just getting your documents into and out of the iPad is a kludge. You must e-mail them back and forth to yourself or sync to your computer
using iTunes software. —Steve Morgenstern M-W
Kludge (v.)
(informal) To build or use a kludge. Wiktionary
Both the OED and Green's Dictionary of Slang credit Jackson W.
Granholm as the first person to use the term. In his 1962 essay "How
to Design a Kludge," he defines kludge as "An ill-assorted collection
of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole." The OED
calls it a "jocular invention." Ace Pilkington et al.; Science
Fiction and Futurism: Their Terms and Ideas (2017)
Jury-Rigging and Whatnot
Figure 10.1 shows one of my favorite examples of jury-rigging. Ian
Wilkerson, a colleague in Sydney, had a leak in his roof and asked a
journeyman friend to help. The man rigged a funnel attached below the
leak, to a tube leading out the front door over a railing, drooping
toward the ground, slowly draining. Finding that a lamp in his house
was hanging too low, the man also slung the lamp cord over the tube,
jury rigging on jury rigging. Stuart Kauffman; A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life (2019)
We continually jury-rig aspects of our outward appearance, persona,
and achievements in order to gain the acceptance and accolades from
others that we can't provide to ourselves. Laurie Warren; Wild
World, Joyful Heart (2019)
But the most puzzling thing about it was that the whole thing seemed
to be just jury-rigged–as if someone had done no more than a hurried,
patch-up job to get the set back in working order on an emergency and
temporary basis. Clifford Simak; The Big Front Yard (2015)
Examples of kludge outside of IT:
The liberal state may therefore be thought of as a kludge—an
inelegant, workaround solution to the otherwise intractable problem of
banishing the political means. It seems clear to me that we liberals
don't know how to eliminate the political means altogether. Jason
Kuznicki; Technology and the End of Authority (2017)
In light of these issues, perhaps we should think of increasing block
rates as “policy kludges” that are “clumsy but temporarily
effective” while ultimately leading to larger problems... Ronald
Griffin; Water Resource Economics (2016)
When we are young, often we rush and are tempted to kludge. We
come up with a fix and think, “Eh, it's not perfect, but it'll do for
now.” If you are not careful, as you get older, those quick fixes can
become permanently fixed in your ways. Twyla Tharp; Keep it
Moving (2020)
