jerkwater

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The Word of the Day for October 24 is: 

jerkwater   \JERK-waw-ter\   adjective
         *1 : remote and unimportant 
     2 : trivial 

Example sentence:
     "We're stranded in some jerkwater town in the middle of nowhere," said 
Larry when he called to tell us that the car's engine had blown. 

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 the fact that these jerkwater trains typically 
ran on lines connecting small middle-of-nowhere towns.





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