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.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

More from this show

Dump Truck Badonkadonk

Jennifer teaches yoga on the beach on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and she and her students have been collecting synonyms for derrière, such as dump truck, rear end, and badonkadonk. The last of these has been around for at least 25 years, and was...

Recent posts