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.
Transcript of “A Jabroni is Basically a Chump or a Knucklehead”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, Martha and Grant.
This is Jonas calling from beautiful Chatham, Virginia.
Hi, Jonas.
Hi, Jonas.
What’s up?
All right.
Although now I teach at a girls boarding school, once upon a time, I taught at a boys independent school.
And I taught English up in the upper school up in the 12th grade and also coach track.
So one day, waiting for track practices to start, and one of my colleagues from the lower school where the seventh and eighth graders live, you know, walked up and he’s shaking his head.
And I was like, Coach, what’s happening?
And he said, Coach, all week I’ve told the algebra class that they’re going to have a test.
And I gave it today, and none of those jabronis must have studied because half of them failed it.
And I immediately barked laughter and said, jabronis?
And he said, yep.
And I said, what does that even mean?
And he said, no idea.
But he said, one of my teachers when I was in grade school used it, and I’ve been using it ever since.
So it entered my lexicon on that very day, and I’ve used it constantly without really ever having thought about what it exactly means until a couple months ago in one of my college English classes.
I just sort of used it, and a student’s little hand kind of raises like a balloon and says, Coach, what is a jabroni?
And I said, you know, like a knucklehead type thing.
But it occurred to me that I really had no idea what it means.
And so I’m hoping that the oracles of etymology will be able to help me with this.
I like that. Her hand raises like a balloon.
I can see it slowly going up.
It’s funny because jabroni, I think, is widespread enough because of TV and movies that it’s not regional, if it ever was.
But most people who’ve ever looked into it, and by that I mean lexicographers and etymologists, there seems to be something Italian about it.
It’s funny because it’s not an Italian word.
The best guess that we know of it might, and this is completely a guess, come from a dialect word from Milan that means hambone.
Giamboni and partly because that’s the butt of the animal but also because ham has similar derogatory notions in in Italian that it does in English.
A ham is somebody who’s like, you know, they’re not fully committed to something, they’re kind of goofing off, they’re not paying attention, that sort of thing.
But it goes back at least 100 years in English we can find it.
Again and again in the early days, curiously enough, in the magazine variety, you know, this Hollywood journal of what’s going on in the entertainment business. I don’t know why, but a lot of the early print uses first show up in that magazine. And it didn’t always mean like a knucklehead, although I think that’s a really good synonym. Sometimes in the beginning it was an outsider or a new immigrant or a naive person, a newcomer, but it also could mean a thug or a gangster or a gunman, a hood, a tough.
Wow. I mean, that part never occurred to me. I mean, it just, it struck me. I immediately knew what he was talking about. Maybe it’s because he’s dealing with eighth graders. But it’s so fun to say and so sort of onomatopoeic.
And I appreciate what you’ve told me about this. When I mentioned that I work at a girl school, the thing about that term is that I can’t imagine ever using it to refer to girls.
Yeah, it does have something masculine about it, right?
Jabroni.
It just seems like a chump, a big palooka.
I tend to associate it with professional wrestling.
That’s mainly the context where I’ve heard it.
Well, it has come up in professional wrestling.
Certainly since the 90s, it was borrowed into professional wrestling, where it typically means a wrestler who is scripted to lose, also known as a jobber.
But it really just started appearing there about 30 years ago.
So it doesn’t come from wrestling, but it’s used in wrestling.
A couple of things before we go.
I have a couple of books that have really looked into Italian-American language, including the dialects of Italian spoken in the United States.
And neither one of them mentions this term.
So we’re not really sure that it is Italian.
And the other thing is there are something like 16 or 17 different spellings that I’ve collected over the years for this term.
You might encounter it and wonder, is that the same word in it probably is?
All right.
Excellent.
Well, thanks for weighing in on this.
I really appreciate it.
Yeah, sure.
Thanks for your call, Jonas.
All right.
Y’all take care.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Thanks, Jonas.
Bye.
