jabroni

Fans of professional wrestling will undoubtedly be familiar with the term jabroni, meaning a loser, a poser, an incompetent or substandard wrestler. The wrestler (now actor and general-purpose celebrity) Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson popularized the term beginning in the late 1990s. To call someone a jabroni is, of course, an insult.

But jabroni is much older than pro wrestling, dating to the early twentieth century. There is this delightful, slang-infested description of a New York City pickpocketing gang that uses the spelling Jiboney that appeared in Variety on 27 July 1919:

I met a “gun” mob from New York up here workin’ the State Fair. They said the grift is getting very “schwack” around the City since all the chumps are buying Liberty Bonds and wearing wrist watches. If your workin’ a short, the only way you can grab a “souper” is to cut the guys arm off. They were tellin’ me about a bad break they got not long ago and why they lammed out of New York. It seems their on the make this night and they ride up and down the subway without seein’ a prospect, nothin’ but a lot of Jiboney’s goin’ to work. Their about to put up the shutters when they spy a lush at 14th street, and he’s all lit up like a drug store window. He held plenty, havin’ a tweezer in his right upper jerve, a bundle of scratch in his right britch, a poke in his left hip, and a hoople on his right duke as big as Al Reeve’s.

(gun mob = pickpocketing team; short = short con, larceny of what the victim has on them; souper = watch; tweezer = ???, perhaps a pocket watch; jerve = vest pocket; scratch = money; britch = trouser pocket; poke = wallet; hoople = ring; Al Reeves = a noted vaudeville entertainer and burlesque impresario at the time; misspellings of you’re and they’re and the misuse of apostrophes are sic)

Like most slang terms, the origins of jabroni are vague, but in this case there are a couple of competing hypotheses that are plausible. The word likely comes from Italian, and in Italian-American contexts it is often used to refer to recent immigrants, i.e., someone who is inexperienced and unfamiliar with American customs, or someone who acts like a recent immigrant.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang gives an etymology from the Italian slang gabrone, meaning a cuckold. But other than the similarity in form, there is little evidence to support it. (If one looks hard enough, one can always find a similar sounding or looking word in one language or another.) While a semantic development from cuckold to general loser is certainly plausible, I don't know of any early examples of jabroni meaning cuckold.

More promising is the Oxford English Dictionary’s suggestion that it may come from the Milanese dialect word giambone, meaning ham. The word ham, short for ham-fisted, has been used in boxing and wrestling circles for a substandard fighter, a palooka, since the late nineteenth century. Farmer and Henley’s 1893 slang dictionary records this use of ham in the Missouri Republican of 27 March 1888:

Connelly […] is a good fighter, but will allow the veriest of ham to whip him, if there is any money to be made by it.

(As far as I know, this edition of the paper has not been digitized and may be lost to the ages, but the meaning of ham in this context is clear from this snippet.)

The northern Italian giambone may have acquired this ham-sense of an incompetent or inexperienced person when it was brought to America, which would also explain the Italian-American use to mean a recent immigrant. While this suggestion by the OED has more evidentiary support than the one given by Green’s, it’s still not enough for us to state with confidence that it is the origin.

Historically, jabroni has had a wide variety of spellings, but since the 1990s the jabroni spelling has become dominant. This spelling and its use in professional wrestling circles was probably also influenced by the term jobber, which started to appear in wrestling jargon a few years before jabroni did. A jobber is a wrestler who is paid by the bout, essentially paid to lose to the stars. We see this use in Missouri’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch of 1 April 1994;

Learning the ropes of pro wrestling can be a bruising business. Just ask Raymond Roy.

[…]

But “it’s a living and a place to start,” said Roy, 32. “Hopefully, I’ll get to move up in time. It’s the contract guys who really get the money in this game, not the jobbers like me.”

Just how much does Roy get paid for his odd job?

As an independent contractor for the World Wrestling Federation, he receives as much as $500 for the beatings he routinely absorbs.

And in this Associated Press piece from 30 April 1994 about an injured jobber who won a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against the wrestling federation he worked for:

Austin, 37, a former linebacker for the University of North Carolina, walks unsteadily on crutches. He can no longer work and relies on painkillers. He was a jobber in the choreographed world of pro wrestling, part-time talent paid to make the stars look good.

So that’s jabroni. The origin should officially be classified as “unknown,” but unlike most slang terms of its nature, we have a reasonable guess as to where it comes from.

Sources:

Associated Press. “Jury Gives Pro Wrestler $20.2 Million.” Saturday State-Times/Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), 30 April 1994, 3A/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Farmer, John S. and W. E. Henley, Slang and Its Analogues, vol. 3 of 7. 1893, 253, s.v. ham, subs. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d. s.v. jabroni, n., jibone, n.

Kee, Lorraine. “Morning Briefing: Eye Openers.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri), 1 April 1994, 2D/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2018, s.v. jabroni, n.; December 2008, s.v. jobber, n.2; second edition, 1989, s.v. ham, n.1 & adj.

“Peeking Through the Bushes” (25 June 1919), Variety, 27 July 1919, 21. ProQuest Magazines.