jerk water
- noun
- Slang
:
agua de jerk
- He slathered his chicken in jerk water before roasting it over the fire.
Examples
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The tap in the old building only dispensed jerk water that tasted terrible.
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No one wanted to drink the jerk water after seeing its cloudy appearance.
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This jerk water tastes terrible!
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The jerk waters in this region are not safe to drink.
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No one wanted to drink the jerk water after seeing its cloudy appearance.
-
The tap in the old building only dispensed jerk water that tasted terrible.
-
This jerk water tastes terrible!
Synonyms
8
4.2
A spicy Jamaican way of seasoning and grilling meat
Surface Forms
Morphology
Combining 'jerk' (a spicy marinade) with 'water' plausibly yields a liquid flavored or associated with jerk, so the culinary sense is at least partly compositional and could be inferred by a learner who knows both words. However the listed humorous sense ('unappealing or poor-quality water') is metaphorical and not directly predictable from the constituents, and the term is ambiguous between literal flavored-liquid and idiomatic insult, so overall it is not fully transparent.
Etymology
Jerk water comes from the spicy cooking word jerk and the ordinary word water; imagine cooks watering down strong, spicy jerk sauce until it becomes thin and watery, or someone joking that cloudy tap water tastes like that weak sauce. So, the term can mean a thin, spicy sauce 'used for marinating' or, jokingly, 'unappealing' drinking water.