jack up

Origin: * Sense of “hoist with a jack” is from 1885; then, “increase prices, etc.” (1904, American English); both ultimately from noun mechanical device used to raise heavy objects * “Screw up, mess up” sense derived from, or influenced by fuck up, as a bowdlerization; also possibly influenced by high, intoxicated * First dialectal idiomatic meaning: “abandon, give up” (1873), possibly a corruption of chuck up, as chuck up the sponge (“give up, concede, give token of submission”). Origin information sourced from Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0).