Thinly dressed with yellow mustard and slapped between two slices of white bread, bologna is found in the lunchboxes of many American youth. But, what does the cold cut have to do with baloney , a slang word that implies nonsense? It is similar to the Italian mortadella , which originated in the Italian city of Bologna. While Oscar Mayer Americanized bologna, it is enjoyed in different forms throughout the world.
In Newfoundland, it is a popular breakfast food called the Newfie Steak. In any case, the jocular potential for baloney spread in another direction that year, thanks in part to Jack "Con" Conway, an editor at Variety who specialized in writing slang-filled articles fashioned as letters to his friend "Chick. Jack "Con" Conway uses baloney to mean "nonsense," Variety , June 30, Conway gets the credit in Jonathan Lighter's Historical Dictionary of American Slang for the first known use of baloney in its modern sense perhaps influenced by blarney , but an article from earlier that year in the New York Evening World suggests the new meaning was already known.
He sees a customer receiving a package and assumes it's illicit booze, but the proprietor tells him it was only "half a pound of bologna. Regardless of whether Conway was the originator of the new sense he's also been credited with scram , bimbo , payoff , pushover , and, yes, palooka , it took a couple of cartoonists to popularize baloney as an incredulous interjection, handily euphemizing more forceful words for nonsense beginning with "B.
Panels from H. Tuthill's "Home, Sweet Home," Sept. Panel from H. Tuthill's "The Bungle Family," Oct. Already a subscriber? Click here to login. See, for instance, Barry Popik's website , which dates the saying "No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney" to Much as we saw with malarkey , we can thank sportswriters and cartoonists of the '20s for enriching our language with an evocative word for phony, insincere talk.
Just don't spell it bologna. Linguist Mark Liberman's theory is that our bizarre pronunciation follows the pattern of Italian words ending in -ia Italia, Sicilia, and Lombardia , which took on -y endings in English Italy, Sicily and Lombardy.
Others believe that it could have sprung from Italians' penchant for shortening and altering words like "prosciut" for "prosciutto" and "mozz" or "mozzarel" for " mozzarella.
By the s, people were using "baloney" or boloney to describe non-food-related things. According to HuffPost , writer Harry Charles Witwer referred to a big clumsy boxer as "a boloney" in It wasn't long before it was being used as a slang term within the larger world of sports.
And then somewhere along the line, the "funny-sounding word" took on the definition we use it for today: nonsense. Some slices of bologna between two slices of white bread with a few condiments makes for a delectable meal.
However, have you ever wondered how bologna came to be? Bologna gets its name from a city in Italy also called Bologna. Mortadella is essentially the grandfather of the bologna everyone knows and loves in the United States. Both meats primarily use the same ingredients. American bologna generally consists of pork, beef or a combination of the two. This meat is then blended together seamlessly. Spices and other ingredients might be added to the mix.
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