Jabronie, Jaboney, Jambone

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Nate. I’m calling from Blacksburg, Virginia.

Nate!

Hi, Nate. Welcome to the program.

Thank you. I have a question. A couple years ago, I was a big fan of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

And in one episode, Thor the Wrestler calls Larry a jabroni.

And that word kind of stuck with me.

And then I was watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and they used the word again.

And here in southwest Virginia, nobody uses that word.

Nobody at all.

Never heard it before.

Yeah, I think it’s a funny word.

In fact, it really cracks me up.

I use it.

It’s not vulgar or anything, so you can kind of say it around people.

But nobody knows what it means, and I’m curious, what is the origin of that word?

And, Nate, how would you use it in a sentence?

Well, let’s say I went to get an iced tea from a drive-thru window, and they didn’t put a straw with the tea.

I might say, well, that jabroni forgot my straw.

And you have to swing back around and go back in.

So it kind of means a knucklehead or a stupid fellow, right?

Right.

And any idea how to spell that word, jabroni?

That was going to be actually my follow-up question was, what do you think the spelling of that word is?

If it’s G-E-B-R-O-N-I, or…

I really don’t know.

This is a word that is in all the slang dictionaries,

And I’ve actually answered questions about this before,

And I know of at least 15 different spellings of the word.

Wow.

In print, mind you, from a wide variety of sources,

Including newspapers and books and stuff.

Here’s the really interesting thing about this.

It’s used in professional wrestling to mean kind of a chump, right?

Okay.

Isn’t it the jabroni is like the guy who has to lose?

He’s the heel.

I think that’s what they call it.

He’s the guy who is, he’s not the cute one, as they say.

He’s the one who’s supposed to lose the match.

So he’s the designated loser.

Yeah, he’s the, you know,

When the wrestling roadshows make their tour,

Sometimes they’ll bring in local talents

To play with the superstar.

And the superstar is inevitably going to win.

The local guy who’s going to lose,

But is there to kind of like to build up his own reputation

Is the jabroni, right?

But this word actually goes back to the 1920s, and there’s strong evidence that suggests it comes from a word for Italian-Americans or other immigrants, people who are fresh off the boat, FOB, as they say, who might have used a dialect word in Italian to mean ham from the Milanese dialect, right?

So it’s possible that it comes from, it’s the strongest evidence that we have, and you find it used again and again and again since the 1920s, 1921 to be exact, to refer to somebody who is either a rube or a loser or somebody who’s like on the out, somebody who’s out of favor, somebody who’s disreputable.

It’s always got a negative connotation about this.

It’s always the other guy.

You almost never call yourself a jabroni, right?

Right, right.

So you’re just a big old smelly ham.

Yeah, it could be.

Yeah, exactly.

And what is the most common spelling of it?

Good question.

Is there any way to know that?

In the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, which is a dictionary that is widely respected among lexicographers,

The spelling given at the head word, that is the first bold word, is J-I-B-O-N-E-Y.

But in the Dictionary of American Regional English, the first spelling is J-A-B-R-O-N-I-E, jabroni.

So sometimes there’s an R in there and sometimes there isn’t.

Okay.

One of the things I wondered was maybe if this actually traced back to a specific individual.

Joe Jabroni?

Yeah.

Somebody like that who just did something unfortunate around a group of people and just took off.

I think you have a future in etymology, Nate.

That’s pretty good.

As far as we know, there’s no individual.

It’s interesting, though, the first, I think it’s four uses you can find of this term,

And actually with the same spelling, come from Variety magazine.

In 1921 and 1922, the first sentence is actually, it says,

This jaboni comes back with, sorry, this is a five-story building, and we ain’t got no sixth floor.

It sounds like a variety word, you know.

Baffo.

Jabroni.

Okay.

Wow, that was great.

Yeah.

All right. Thanks for calling, dude.

Thank you. Enjoyed it.

All right. Take care. Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Grant, you big jabroni.

I love that.

A little bit of a hand.

I’m so stealing that.

What’s the words you heard from the thing that you like to do?

Call us, you jabronis.

Every pastime has its slang.

Every job has its jargon.

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