All jacked up…

Is a term peculiar to Kansas and Missouri maybe… I don’t know, someone tell me if you hear it in other regions. Anyway, my last post was all jacked-up — the Link to the Chavez article is now fixed. Hey, if you see something screwed up like that, it is ok to leave a comment and let me know btw.

The etymology of “Jacked-up” was explained to me by someone when I first moved here, if someone has a better one please let me know, they could have been pulling my leg. 

Supposedly the the term comes from “jack-leg” which was a confederate soldier returning from the civil war to Missouri, called that for the stripe on their pant legs or type of pants they wore. These guys were the cheap labor in Kansas, since the economy in Missouri wasn’t exactly booming at the time. If you used a “jack-leg” contractor, then the work was supposedly inferior, thus the term “all jacked-up”.

Update:

I received an email with an alternate etymology for “all jacked up” — it refers to being in a bad state from too many JD and cokes. There’s even a song that’s supportive of this theory.