Every industry has its own jargon and the once secretive-world of pro wrestling is no different. John Lister explores the origins of some of wrestling’s most common terms.
Perhaps no word is more symbolic of professional wrestling than the ultra-versatile “kayfabe.” In its purest sense it’s the concept of protecting the fiction that professional wrestling is a genuine contest rather than a cooperative effort. It can also be an instruction, with “kayfabe” a warning that outsiders are on hand and that wrestlers should cease talking about insider subjects or conversing with supposed enemies. It’s such a ubiquitous term that it can serve for almost any meaning: Missy Hyatt recalls that at Starrcade 93 Road Warrior Hawk shouted “Kayfabe your breast” at her and she instantly deciphered his instruction to readjust her dress.
Exactly when the term originated is hard to trace, though a post war manager with the real name Bob Russell worked as Boris K Fabian, while a Kaye Fabian worked in Portland in the 1960s, both clearly insider jokes for an established term. Indeed, there’ve been several such references over the years, with Gorilla Monsoon said to have used “Kaye Fabe” as a personalised license plate.
Meanwhile Gene Okerlund, in a slot on the Best of The WWF Vol 7 videotape interviews members of the public about their picks for the 1986 Slammy Awards and informs one reticent participant that “you can tell me who you voted for, I won’t say a word. Trust me, it can be a kayfabe deal.” The following year’s Slammies had an even more explicit reference with the director listed in the credits as “Kaye Fabe”.
Many accounts of the term’s origin suggest it refers to an actual person’s name, whether Kaye Fabe, K. Fabian or some other variation, the story being that such a person was known for spilling secrets. There’s no evidence whatsoever of such a person existing and it appears to be a “false” or “folk etymology” in which people try to construct a logical origin of a word which then gains credibility because it appears to make sense. The closest possible match is Philadelphia promoter Aurelio “Ray” Fabiani, though that would almost certainly have been pronounced “fab-iani” rather than “fabe-iani”.
A commonly cited theory is that it derives from Pig Latin, a linguistic trick usually used by children that involves moving the initial syllable of a word to the end, then adding “ay” or “way” as needed. For example, you might be reading Ightingfay Piritsay Agazinemay. The theory goes that “kayfabe” is some form of Pig Latin corruption of “fake” or even “be fake”; the former seems unlikely as it would produce “akefay” while the later would be a particularly scrambled corruption of an unnatural phrase.
Another, more credible possibility, is that it comes from a foreign language. The Latin word cave (pronounced cay-vay) literally translates as “beware”. There are some claims that public schoolboys would use the term as a pretentious method of warning that a teacher was approaching, though it’s unclear if this ever happened outside of children’s fiction. However, it does appear to have been used in this way among East Londoners between the wars and may have originated from Yiddish, which could explain it being adopted by American promoters of a European Jewish background.
Another contender for a foreign language origin is the term “qui vive”, a French term used in English to mean to keep a watch out, being alert and vigilant. It translates literally as “who lives”, a contraction of “long live who?”, which appears to be an 18th century term used by sentries to garner whether or not somebody was loyal to the monarchy. The pronunciation is closer to “key-veev” but could conceivably have been corrupted.
Kayfabe often involved hiding any meeting of the heroic babyface and the villainous heel. The former term is self-explanatory, while the latter takes its name from villainous roles in books and films. Countdown’s resident linguistics expert Susie Dent answered a viewer question about the wrestling term by explaining that it shares its origins with the “heel” in gangster fiction. That in turn derives from “down at heel”, literally meaning somebody whose shoes had worn away at the heel from overuse because they couldn’t afford to replace them. In turn the implication was that such a person was more likely to commit crime and have a relaxed moral code.
With wrestling’s secretive nature, the terms “babyface” and “heel” were once virtually never used on screen, if nothing else because there was no formal acknowledgement that wrestlers fell into two camps. Where a distinction did need to be made in independent, but kayfabe-compliant magazines such as those fronted by Bill Apter, the workaround was to instead coin the descriptive terms “fan favorite” and “rulebreaker”.
It’s a very different situation in Mexico where the equivalents of babyface and heel are, respectively, technico and rudo. The distinction is much more explicit: teams are directly announced as falling into one of the two camps and the terms appear in on-screen graphics keeping track of the score in best-of-three fall matches. This is possible even within the storyline world as the terms, which literally translate as ‘rough’ and ‘technician’, are presented as referring more to a wrestler’s preferred grappling style than their moral code.
Whatever you call them, the good guys and the bad guys are doing one thing (cooperating in a performance) while pretending to do another (competing in an athletic contest.) That led to two other significant words: the work and the shoot. The former is largely self-explanatory, referring to the fact that professional wrestlers are working with one another and that no matter what their legitimate grappling abilities, they are employees or contractors more than they are sportsmen.
To shoot, in its strictest sense, means to wrestle in a competitive manner. The word almost certainly derives from the pro game’s amateur roots, in which somebody will “shoot” for a takedown. The two terms are the surviving elements of what was once a hierachy within the business, with the pure performer or worker at the bottom, then the shooter (somebody with traditional amateur grappler skills), and at the top the hooker (somebody who had specialist knowledge of legitimate submissions, hence ‘hooking’ a limb). That left one remaining category: the ripper, generally defined as somebody whose goal was as much to cause injury as it was to score a win.
Variations on “shoot” are arguably the ‘insider’ term most commonly used by fans who believe themselves to have become wise to the inner workings of the business, sometimes in an inaccurate manner. For example, any incident of a wrestler taking liberties in the ring or going off-script in a promo is quickly described as a “shoot”. In the purest sense, a shoot is a match with no pre-determined outcome, something that doesn’t appear to have happened in public under traditional pro wrestling rules since Mildred Burke vs June Byers in 1954.
Today most uses of the term are some form of marketing or promotional tool. An entire sub-industry has grown up around the “shoot interview”. While such a non-storyline discussion is now hardly unusual, at one point the difference did have to be stressed. Rob Feinstein of RF Video believes he was the first to coin the term, for a 1996 video release interviewing New Jack.
Within the business, any mention of a “shoot” during a wrestling show will usually be an attempt to fool ‘knowledgeable’ fans into believing something has gone off-script when that is not the case. While this might seem a modern phenomenon, with Shane Douglas’s cry of “He’s shooting!” during Brian Pillman’s first ECW Arena appearance in 1996 an early example, it’s actually an ancient tactic.
Several matches in the 1930s were falsely billed as “shoots”, the most famous involving Jim Londos vs Ed Lewis at Wrigley Field in Chicago. The ‘smart’ fans of the day, aided by tell-all stories in newspapers, knew that Lewis was a genuine shooter while Londos was, for all his drawing power and appeal, a pure performer. Promoters played on the audience’s mistaken belief that Lewis would never agree to put Londos over and openly promoted the match as “the last great shooting match in history.” It wasn’t, but it did draw 35,000 fans and set a gate record that lasted 20 years.
Sadly one term from the whole work/shoot issue has fallen from favour. The Wrestling Perspective newsletter, which put together a collection of early newspaper reports questioning wrestling’s legitimacy, has found numerous examples of journalists being outraged that wrestlers were not competing on the level and instead were engaged in “hippodroming.” That’s from “hippodrome”, a term used for many theaters of the era, deriving from ancient Greek horse and chariot stadiums with the word translating literally as “horse course.”
With wrestling being a bizarre mix of people simultaneously working together in matches while competing for audience and promoter attention, it’s not surprising some terms come with ambiguous value judgments. A good example is to job, meaning to lose a worked match, which in turn brought about the “jobber”, a person who loses the majority of their matches. In its simplest sense it’s a neutral term, reflecting the fact that the person losing is not an inferior competitive grappler, but rather somebody literally doing their job.
However, it can also be used as a derogative term, the implication being the wrestlers lacks the performance skills or charisma to take on a star role; such a usage seems to have become popular among first newsletter and later website readers who acquired insider terminology at a faster rate than they increased their true understanding of the wrestling business. The more corporate alternative is “extra” or “enhancement talent”; the latter is established enough to be the name of a status in the PS3 WWE All Stars game, earned by winning 10 online matches.
In its most negative sense, jobber can be extended to “jobroni” or “jabroni.” While it was a favoured insult of The Rock on-screen in the late 1990s, he by no means coined it. Jim Cornette recalled that when Jim Crockett Promotions acquired a second jet plane in 1986, one was used by the very top tier of talent while the other was dubbed the “jabroni express.” Meanwhile in the aforementioned Slammies interview, Gene Okerlund reminds the tight-lipped voter that “you’re not talking to some jobroni.”
It’s possible this term might go beyond simply coming up with a more elaborate version of “jobber.” It may instead be a variation of “jaboney”, a term that goes back in print to the 1920s. It has more than a dozen different possible spellings, but definitely appears to derive from Italian immigrants to the US in the early 20th century, referring to a new, inexperienced arrival to an area.
The precise origin is uncertain, though lexicographer Grant Barrett of the Way with Words show speculated that it could come from a Milanese term for ham. That would be apt given that Gorilla Monsoon would regularly refer to perennial losers on television as “ham and eggers”, a term based around the idea that they would only earn enough to buy a modest meal.
Many wrestling terms derive from the old touring carnival circuit, something that’s hardly surprising given that wrestling was a key part of early carnivals. Most would have an At Show, taken from the “athletic tent”, in which wrestlers and boxers took on members of the public. In many cases the carnival’s own wrestlers would either take on plants or deliberately carry a genuine challenger to build up rematches in which fans would be tricked into betting on somebody who would either take a dive or have no realistic chance of winning a contest.
Among the carnival terms that became adopted by pro wrestlers are draw (a cash advance on the payoff you’d normally not get until the end of a tour) and heat (both crowd emotion and ill-will between wrestlers). The most prominent is mark, which originally referred to the entire fanbase and was later adopted by a section of that audience to refer to those fans who believed wrestling to be a genuine contest.
The term comes from the practice of carnival workers who spotted a particularly gullible customer and literally marked his back (usually with chalk dust) so that other workers would know to target him for their gambling games or other cons. In a wider sense the term became used among the hobo community who would mark gateposts to signify a generous householder, often with specific symbols to indicate particular tactics that might succeed in earning food, shelter or work.
The carnivals also provided a dialect for those in the wrestling business. ‘Carny’ involves adding the sound ‘iz’ (or in some cases ‘eez’) before one or more vowels in a word, hence “spizeaking cizarny.” It was a dialect particularly suited to the secretive world of pro wrestling as, even if an outsider listening in was aware of the trick, it’s only decipherable to somebody who has spent a lot of time around other speakers.
While it doesn’t appear carny is as widely spoken in wrestling circles today as in the past, it has made its way on screen on several occasions. Hulk Hogan once asked for a “tizime cue” on a live edition of The Main Event; unfortunately he was already on air. Carny was the basis of DX having the spoof character “Mizark Henry” when feuding with the Nation of Domination, while the former Sinn Bodhi had a brief run in WWE as Kizarney. And manager James Mitchell frequently used carny to smuggle obscene messages on to the airwaves in Smoky Mountain and ECW by purporting to ‘speak in tongues’, including the message “Fizuck Rizusso”.
With pro wrestling on the largest scale now more about corporations rather than carnivals, you might think there was no longer any need for obscure language and jargon, beyond self-conscious attempts to talk about “superstars, championships and the universe” rather than “wrestlers, belts and the fans.” But that would be reckoning without WWE’s chief financial officer George Barrios, whose attempts to bamboozle and evade on investor conference calls have led to some fans playing ‘Barrios bingo’.
Classics include touting the company having “460 million social media touchpoints” (which means adding up every single time anyone saw something from a WWE account on any service) and referring to 159 million US homes having an “affinity” for WWE programming, without explaining what that means or why only a few million of them watch WWE Raw.
And while wrestling language was once about hiding the way wrestling worked, it appears today’s jargon is about hiding the detail of exactly how the business is performing. Or as Barrios put it when asked for some specific WWE Network subscriber number projections: ” We’re not comfortable getting into that level of granularity.”
British Variations
Like any jargon or language, wrestling terms have their own regional variations. That’s certainly the case with the UK where, while many wrestlers were familiar with some of the common terms, they also used their own variations for the same concept. For example, the lock-up — the initial gripping of arms that customarily starts a bout, was known in the UK as the link-up.
Some of the behind the scenes terms also varied. The industry term for a babyface was a ‘blue eye’, likely a contraction of “blue eyed boy” meaning a favoured child or a sign of a good person. That term, equivalent to “fair haired child” in other English-language countries, appears to have some unsavoury origins rooted in the idea of racial purity. When it came to the blue eyes’ opposite numbers, British wrestling preferred the straightforward “villain” to “heel.”
Another variation was “doing a gee” in place of the American “angle”, though this most commonly referred specifically to a post-match argument (often involving somebody not in the match) rather than more elaborate storyline events. It’s likely derived from the idea of “geeing up” a crowd, meaning to get them excited.
While many wrestlers from the 70s and 80s are familiar with the term kayfabe, Jackie Pallo recalled that as a shouted instruction warning those nearby to keep quiet in the presence of an outsider, some Brits would instead use “Queens”, a rhyming slang for “Queens Park Rangers” meaning “strangers.”
Promotional activity also had its own terms. In place of the “house show” (a non-televised event at a regularly run venue) Brits would often refer to a “town show” (which also distinguished it from an event at a holiday camp.) Meanwhile a one-off visit to a venue, known in the US as a “spot show” was instead usually a “one night stand.”
