Why is bologna spelled that way

But for something so common, most Americans know very little about bologna's origin. While we're not going to get into the exact ingredients used to make the homogenous meat mostly pork , we do want to explore another bologna mystery: why it's pronounced "baloney" and not "bo-lo-nya. Not surprisingly, the answer takes us to Italy. In particular, to the northern town of Bologna bo-lo-nya , where mortadella, bologna's kissing cousin, was born.

Mortadella is traditional cured sausage made from ground pork. The bologna we know and love was derived from mortadella. In a Vocabulary. As for the sausage, both baloney and bologna are accepted spellings, though the famous Oscar Mayer jingle has certainly pushed the latter.

So depending on how you look at it, the way we pronounce or spell bologna is News U. Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism. Special Projects Highline. 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. Article Topics: Fun, Words, Usage. Sign up for email. In addition to his regular "Word Routes" column here, he contributes to the group weblog Language Log. Click here to read more articles by Ben Zimmer.

But the reason for it being specifically phony is that it rhymes. London isn't the only place where such things are inevitable. Or am I being ham-handed in pointing out the lunch-meat of the issue? I think I've embarrassed myself enough. Saturday May 4th , AM. Do you have a comment?

Smith, who served as the governor of New York four times and was the first Roman Catholic major party nominee to run for president. He frequently used the term baloney in reference to Washington bureaucracy. Located in a wall in a castle near Cork, Ireland, the stone is said to turn whoever kisses it into a persuasive flatterer. Feedback See Today's Synonym.

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