Sounds like a story there, I’d like to know exactly how you did it.
I guess I must be the only person who read the title and thought it referred to a new hairstyle fad.
It was snowing really hard one night after work and one of my coworker’s windshield wipers broke. The wiper arm receptical had a number of stripped splines and would not move with the motor. I looked into her vehicle and there was an old Wendy’s bag so I took the metalized hamburger wrapper and jammed it into the area of the missing splines. The wipers got her home.
Me too.
Though as to the OP, I guess you can view it one of two ways. One is that of a skewing of the old saying “make do or do without”. Or, that is that black people have learned through adversity to cleverly extend the life of or make things work with little money or standard mechanic-ing.
The other way would be to think that it means shoddy workmanship. I like to prefer to think of it, if someone simply MUST use that phrase, as the first meaning.
Outstanding.
Especially impressive because you aren’t even black.
Reminds me of a Thai hotel worker who was caught breaking into the room safes using a method he said he learned from watching MacGyver. This was about a four-star hotel in Bangkok, with room safes. The kind with a keypad, and you punch in a four-digit code. This one bellboy would wipe “nose oil,” as he phrased it, onto the entire keypad. After a guest checked in and then went out into the city, he would then enter the room and look to see which numbers had been pushed. He would try different combinations of only those numbers until the safe opened. It did not take him long.
Because of this case, I now wipe clean the keypads of any hotel safes that are in my room before I use it.
where I grew up in Norcal, N-rigging was not a complement. Usually it meant some poor white trash had jury rigged something as a permanent fix. Not a temporary fix to get your car home or something. For example, right side window wiper fell off? Simple, just wrap a piece of cloth around the end so it won’t scratch the windshield, and then drive like that forever. Jury rigging would be fixing the windshield wiper so you can drive to the auto parts store and put on a replacement.
I’ve heard the term “nigger-rig” before. I don’t use it myself as I do regard it as a racist term. It was the first thing that came to mind when I read the thread title.
I’ve never heard the term “porch ‘n’ word” before, so I looked it up on Urban Dictionary. Maybe the offensiveness is going over my head, but doesn’t it just mean a black person sitting on a porch? Besides the ‘n’ word, why is this racist? In the older sections of Brooklyn we all sit on our porches, because it’s too darn hot to be in our apartments! 
I’ve also never heard the term ‘n’-rigged before - we grew up with jury rigged, which had positive connotations as an innovative repair done on the fly.
(I also never heard the term ‘jewed-down’ before, but my dh said it was fairly common in Queens).
I came here to say substantially the same thing. If the guy wants to hate everyone on earth, that’s fine; he can even tell everyone that he hates them. We may not agree with him, but as long as he doesn’t harm anyone, I don’t care what he thinks.
There is a funny scene in Clerks II where one of the characters talks about his grandmother calling him and his brother porch monkeys in front of Wanda Sykes who then proceeds to yell at him for being racist. He didn’t know it was a racist term and thought it was because they hung out on the porch all day. The character decides to take the term back from being racist by wearing “porch monkey for life” written on the back of his shirt.
This one I hate. I’ve been told it racist, and it’s not PC to use, but it’s so descriptive of something you don’t want to get involved in.
In my corner of the world (Colorado, almost Nebraskaland) we usually use the term “farmer-rigged” because farmers have a reputation for keeping stuff running with baling wire and duct tape. I’ve also heard the term “jury-rigged” to mean the same thing, but I have no idea where that term came from.
Maybe the “afro-engineered” guy thinks he’s paying homage to blacks because they’re more resourceful, but like most others on this thread, I don’t see how substituting a word in a term that has its roots in bigotry changes things any.
We’ve argued this before on this Board. I maintain that “Tar Baby” isn’t racist at all. It’s from one of the Br’er Rabbit Tales, which ultimately derives from West African tales about Hare or Anansi the Spider. The point of the Tar Baby is that it’s sticky – not that it’s black. In the original Yoruba tale Hare or Anansi gets stuck on a model coated with sticky plant sap, which probably isn’t black anyway.
The problem is that once people get the idea that they’re racist, the idea sticks as tenaciously as a tar baby.
By the way, I’ve never heard the term “nigger-tigged” or its genteel but still racist cousin “Afro-rigged” before. The Board is truly educational. I have heard “jury-rigged” (and “jerry-rigged”, which I assumed was a variation without any reference to Germans), but the meaning seems slightly different. I gather that “Afro-rigged” implies hastily but badly and sloppily put together. “Jury rigged”, as others have noted, means quickly but cleverly improvised.
Well, I usually say “African-American rigged” which I thought was my own joke, but I guess great obnoxious minds think alike.
The point is not to be less bad, but to add on an additional layer of cynicism.
That’s a good one. I’ll have to remember that.
Yes, and the same thing happened to the word “niggardly” (my god, there’s even a Wikipedia article dedicated to the subject). Certain sensitive folks have arrogated themselves the right to remove certain words from the language based on their own misunderstanding of them. It’s a shame, really, because they’ve gone from recognizing actual insult to seeing insult where none previously existed.
Will I go to hell if I call that “afro-etymology?”
I agree with you mostly and I don’t think it is a complete insult except as a way to stereotype a group of people to this day. The origin of nigger-rigging goes way but to when blacks were almost universally dirt poor and had to improvise necessities or keep what they had working way beyond their time. The ability to do that is called nigger-rigging and the concept is a little different than people have suggested. Blacks themselves weren’t being made fun of for making temporary repairs on what they had. They just didn’t have any better alternatives. The really insulting part is that a white person caught nigger-rigging is supposed to be better than that and come up with a lasting solution that may cost money.
My tiny hometown in Northwestern Louisiana has a section called “the quarters” meaning the black section and it has some people living in conditions most people would shocked to find existing in the present day U.S. Houses are made of scrap wood and tin roofs. They are often clearly out of level and you may be able to see through some of the walls. You will see all kinds of improvisations like using car jacks to get the tilt out of the house or whatever they can find to patch the roof, string up clothes lines and make an ancient kitchen appliance work. People used to use the term nigger-rigging for the stuff they did but it wasn’t a direct insult on those types of repairs. People knew they were too poor to do any better. It was when it was used on a white person when it became an insult. It is a subtle point I know
Could it have any relation to the term “house nigger”? Meaning a slave of light color chosen to work as a servant in the mansion rather than break his back in the cotton fields.
“House nigger” only appears in the 1960’s/1970’s. So unlikely.
Really? I don’t doubt you, but that surprises me. I really had heard that the term was used on the old plantations as a disparaging remark by the field slaves against the house servants.