A Jabroni is Basically a Chump or a Knucklehead

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.