Jonas, a high-school English teacher from Chatham, Virginia, is curious about the word jabroni (also spelled jabroney, jabronie, and jabrony), meaning a “chump” or “palooka.” It may come from a Milanese dialect word, jamboni — literally, “ham,” and more generally a derogatory term for a “naive person,” “knucklehead,” or “thug.” Jabroni has been adopted into the world of professional wrestling, where, like the word jobber, it refers to a wrestler who’s scripted to lose a match. We also talked about jabroni on the show another time. This is part of a complete episode.
More from this show
It’s hard to remember how to spell the names of some cities. Tallahassee, Florida, for example. Then there are towns with very few letters to remember. Y, a tiny town in northern France, has only two main streets, which come together to form...
On a busy day in the emergency room, Alisa of Dallas, Texas, told an efficient colleague that she was really humming, meaning it as a compliment. Her colleague took offense, maintaining that humming meant “smelly.” Since the 18th...