Word of the Day

: September 24, 2024

jerkwater

adjective JERK-waw-ter

What It Means

Jerkwater means “remote and unimportant.” It is often used to describe a small town, village, etc., that is out in the country far from cities. Jerkwater can also mean “trivial.”

// I grew up in a jerkwater town in the middle of nowhere.

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jerkwater in Context

“We found a theatre in some jerkwater town with a new movie playing. ...” — Robin Enos and John Downs, The Auburn (California) Journal, 4 Mar. 2023

Did You Know?

We owe the colorful Americanism jerkwater to the invention of the steam engine—an advancement that significantly accelerated travel by rail but also had its drawbacks. One drawback was that the boilers of the early locomotives needed to be refilled with water frequently, and water tanks were few and far between. As a result, the small trains that ran on rural branch lines often had to stop to take on water from local supplies. Such trains were commonly called jerkwaters from the motion of jerking the water up in buckets from the supply to the engine. The derogatory use of jerkwater for things unimportant or trivial reflects attitudes about the small middle-of-nowhere towns connected by the lines on which these jerkwater trains typically ran.