jackleg

1. (US) Amateur, untrained; incompetent.Examples: "1841, Letter to the editor, The Southern Planter, Volume I, No. 1, January 1841, p. 12, The next year I had a projecting kind of jack leg carpenter, from Hanover, living with me in the capacity of overseer […]"; "1941, Martha Colquitt, Interview published in Slave Narratives, Library of Congress Project, Volume 4: Georgia Narratives, Part 1, Grandma didn’t think chillun ought to see funerals, so de first one I ever seed, wuz when ma died two years atter de War wuz done over. A jackleg colored preacher talked, but he didn’t have sense ’nuff to preach a sho’ ’nuff sermon."; "1957, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Wolfbane, Chapter 11, in Galaxy Science Fiction, He was a doer, not a thinker; his skills were the skills of an artisan, a tinkerer, a jackleg mechanic."USnot-comparable

2. (US) Dishonest, unscrupulous.Examples: "The little nosy reporter with the hair was fair crazy to come, but McGinty gets a jackleg doctor to examine him an’ swear that he’s sufferin’ from spatulation o’ the medulla oblongata, housemaid’s knee, and the hives."; "Villard’s great fortune should not be allowed to “dangle” in plain sight of “jack-leg lawyers,” while he, Parkins, awaited final results of the proceedings."; "When I went to the so-called authorities for help I ran into jackleg politicians, wheeler-dealers, henchmen, finaglers and wire-pullers."USnot-comparable

3. (US) Ineptly built or operated; makeshift.Examples: "The train is late […]. ¶ “Well, if I come to such a place as this I must expect a jackleg railroad […].”"; "“With the first good rain the entire jackleg contraption might collapse around my ears […]”"; "2005, William Hoffman, Lies, Montgomery, Alabama: River City Publishing, Chapter 23, p. 226, Driving the secondhand Chevy pickup, he visits not only major car dealerships but also every jackleg garage he happens upon in dusty sun-blasted towns of the Deep South."USnot-comparable