Blading, Booking and Getting Over: Wrestling Terminology 101

Though it is less common today, wrestlers used to go to extreme lengths to protect the business, which meant keeping up the illusion that everything fans saw was real. There are even stories about The Original Sheik growling and throwing fireballs at people on the streets of his native Michigan.

The term used to refer to this illusion is kayfabe, which some say comes from the Pig Latin pronunciation of the work fake (ake-fay). The term can be used in the sense of keeping kayfabe, or even spoken by a wrestler as a signal to other workers that they should stop talking and protect the business.