kayfabe (n.): the portrayal of events in professional wrestling as “real,” including the efforts expended to present match outcomes as not predetermined and to show non-wrestling plot points such as interviews and backstage encounters as unstaged.

Howdy!  Long time no talk.  How’ve you been?  Obama, woo.

My friend Jeremy and I were watching professional wrestling at one point over this past weekend, ’cause it’s good to know what America is up to while we New Yorkers marry gay dogs and sing communist anthems.  I hadn’t seen the WWE since it was called the WWF, when I was in high school, and as if to hammer that point home, this particular slamstravaganza was being broadcast from my hometown of Baltimore, Md.

What’s changed about wrestling since then?  Basically nothing.  But it did remind me of this splendid word “kayfabe,” which I had learned a few months prior and meant to write about before getting distracted by something shiny.

The origins of “kayfabe” are murky, and the fact that it doesn’t appear in any of the dictionaries I have access to (or that this good fellow has access to, which list is much more thorough than mine) only makes its past that much more mysterious.  The seemingly agreed-upon truths are these: the word comes from wrestling’s origins in the world of carnivals, used as a code to describe the obligation of wrestlers to remain in character at all times when in public and never to sell out the fact that wrestling matches were cooperative and predetermined.

Wikipedia offers a few different theories as to the word’s etymology: that broke carnies would call home collect and refer to themselves as “Kay Fabian” to assure their families they were okay without incurring charges; that “kayfabe” is a garbled Pig Latin version of either “fake,” “be fake” “fabricate,” “bake-off,” “beefcake,” “ache pay,” “steak boy,” “babe lake,” “bay bay bay bay bay fakey faker fake fake fake,” or “Waffle House”; or that it’s some kind of mashup of “character fabrication.”  Of these, I prefer the explanation “a carnie who got kicked in the head too many times made up some random ass shit that managed to survive to the Vince McMahon era.”

The act of kayfabe has clearly gotten much more difficult and requires much more suspension of disbelief than it did in the carnie era, but I remember being much more convinced by the spectacle as a kid than now, when the fallacy is patently obvious.  I was drawn to wonder, watching WWE “champion” Jeff Hardy, a man I cannot seem to describe in words other than “emo wigger,” get his (relatively) scrawny ass handed to him by red menace Vladimir Kozlov — a beating aided, at one point by Kozlov’s friend Edge and eventually stopped by the intervention of an angry Triple H — does anyone actually believe this is legit?  And I was further drawn to wonder, as I watched Triple H grab a sledgehammer from a convenient storage unit underneath the ring and threaten Kozlov with it: why is there a referee for a sport in which there are clearly no rules?

Still, though, there’s a soft spot in my heart for wrestling on the merits of its vocabulary.  In addition to “kayfabe,” pro wrestling uses a number of other splendid and thoroughly antiquated slang terms from Depression-era roadshows.  Wrestlers are divided along purely Manichaean lines into “faces” (short for “babyfaces”; the heroes) and “heels” (an insult whose peak was in the ’30s; the villains) and when a wrestler does a “heel turn” the phrase refers not to a pivot to dodge a blow but rather to a good guy converting to bad.  A “screwjob” is a conspiracy to change the ending of a wrestling match on a participant without his knowledge.  Heels can have “stooges,” and wrestlers’ female companions are referred to as “valets.”  But perhaps the clincher is that a wrestling fan who believes the goings-on are real is still, to this day, called a “mark.”