In the second act of Bernard Shaw’s 1905 play Major Barbara, two unemployed proletarians meet and converse at a Salvation Army mission, friendly enough, and one says to the other (with stage direction “cheerfully”),
You’re ony a jumped-up, jerked-off, orspittle-turned-out incurable of an ole workin man: who cares about you? Eh?
The speaker is a socialist of some intellectual pretensions, and his point is that the capitalist system all too routinely discards workers like the one he is addressing, who has lost his job for being too old at 46. He should blame the system, that is, and not himself.
But why and in what sense “jerked-off”? The only glosses I can find for the phrasal verb, from OED through Collins even unto Urban Dictionary, interpret it in terms of (especially male) masturbation. (Even the sense of jerk off as idle, procrastinate, or shirk seems to derive from that primary sense.) Yet although Shaw pushed the envelope of propriety in his time, scandalizing many by having his title character quote Christ on the cross in the present play, and using “bloody” in dialogue in Pygmalion, still I find it hard to believe he would have used “jerked-off” in reference (however figurative) to masturbation, or that if he had it would have got past the censorship then still blocking his Mrs Warren’s Profession from public performance.
But what else could “jerked-off” have meant? Could it mean discharged from employment, fired? That would make the most sense in context, but I have hitherto been able to find no confirmation that such a sense was ever current.
Period (1860–1933) entries for the phrase in Ngrams seem all to refer to sudden bodily removal from a moving train.
Best Answer
The term "jerked-off", meaning masturbation would have been unheard-of in Ireland (and probably Britain) in GBS's time. It seems to mean "thrown out, or discarded", so you're not far off when you say "fired":
https://www.pcs.org/blog/the-world-of-the-play