Pro Wrestling Lingo

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

I know very little about professional wrestling, but it’s amazing what a taste of the sport you can get from just looking at the vocabulary.

There’s a wrestling newsletter called Pro Wrestling Torch, and it has online a glossary of a lot of the terms that they use in professional wrestling.

And I learned so much. I learned that to blade is to cut oneself, usually with a small portion of a razor blade with tape wrapped around all but part of a milliliter of the cutting edge.

And then the exposed portion is run across the skin to cause a clean cut so that the wrestler actually starts bleeding, particularly in the head because the head wounds bleed more than other ones.

And so it’s… it’s part of the showmanship of it, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So the other guy looks like he’s hitting you and maybe there’s some gentle contact but it’s not enough to break the skin.

And you’re like, when you put your hands up there to see if you’re bleeding, that’s when you do the cut.

You pull your hand away and there’s the blood.

Yeah, and it’s called juicing or gigging or getting color.

And there’s also a term in wrestling, red means green, which is an old phrase that’s used to point out that the wrestlers who bled would get a bigger payoff.

If it leads, it bleeds. Isn’t that something?

Yeah, another one is canned heat.

What’s canned heat?

Well, heat is the noise of the crowd, the fans cheering.

And canned heat is when the cheering and booing is added to a wrestling TV show in post-production.

Oh, I have no doubt that they do that.

Isn’t that great?

Yeah.

Got to make it seem exciting, right?

Yeah.

Well, you’re a slang guy. You picked up some slang from wrestling?

I absolutely have. I’ve done some digging on this before.

There are a couple of terms that really struck me, so I looked into them.

One is kayfabe. You and I have talked about this off mic.

Kayfabe. Kayfabe is your persona.

Even off of the mat, even in public, even in front of TV where it’s not really about wrestling, they’re supposed to keep their persona and supposed to not break kayfabe, as it’s called.

Occasionally, when a well-known wrestler will die, his fellow wrestlers will break kayfabe to express their regrets and give their best to the family.

But generally, they keep their persona.

And the personas are broken down into two major types.

One is the heel, which is the bad guy.

And the other one is the baby face, which is the good guy.

And my favorite other term is baby face turn, T-U-R-N.

And a baby face turn is when the good guy goes bad.

And like, yeah, you find like, you know, the golden boy comes out.

And suddenly when the locker room clears and they’re all out there for the big brawl at the end of the show, it’s all the bad guys on his side.

You’re like, wait a second. He’s been misleading us this whole time.

He’s actually a heel. He’s a bad guy.

These turned like milk left out on the counter.

I loved it when I was a kid. I loved it, yeah.

Oh, my goodness. Wow.

We used to watch wrestling with my grandfather from Keele Auditorium in St. Louis, Bulldog Brown.

He was great. I loved these guys.

And this is small-time wrestling, you know, in a small-time place, but it was a lot of heart, a lot of fun.

Obviously, it’s showmanship. Obviously, it’s theater.

Obviously, it’s kayfabe. Obviously, it’s not a sport, but these guys are committed to an art form, which has got a long history.

It’s wonderful. And it has a great vocabulary and language.

We should post a link on our website to this glossary because it’s really fantastic.

Absolutely.

And if there’s some language that you know from professional wrestling or anywhere else, this is the place to talk about it, 877-929-9673.

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