Who the heck decided to pronounced bologna as baloney or decided to write baloney as bologna? While shopping at Safeway today (which I have now found out that postage stamps don’t contribute to the $50 total if you want to get the 10¢ gas discount), I was walking down the ham aisle. While trying to decide what to get, I was surprised the Oscar Mayer Bologna wasn’t on sale, but every other bologna was (beef, turkey, etc.).
Anyway, I always just thought “baloney” was just a slang for bologna since it’s not easy for kids to say bo-lone-ga (which is what I’ve always called it). Someone awhile back corrected me and told me that’s how “baloney” is supposed to be spelled. I was like WTF? What idiot decided to spell baloney like that or decided to pronounce bologna as baloney.
Anyway, I decided to look up bologna to see if there’s a good reason for this. According to Wikipedia:
It is commonly called bologna and often pronounced (by hypercorrection) and/or spelled baloney.
However, I did noticed that there was a city in Italy called Bologna:
Bologna (IPA [boˈloɲɲa], from Latin Bononia, Bulåggna in Emiliano dialect) is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, in the Pianura Padana, between the Po River and the Apennines, exactly between the Reno River and the Sàvena River.
They apparently pronounced Bologna as bo-lone-ya, which I can see how, and definitely sounds more correct than Baloney, Italy.
Digging up some more, I found this on Online Etymology Dictionary:
bologna – 1850, variant of bologna sausage (1596), named for the city in Italy, formerly Bononia. See baloney.
If a city like Bononia does exist, I can completely see why baloney is pronounced as so. Searching on Wikipedia resulted in this:
Bononia is the Roman name of several cities, including:
- Bologna, Italy
- Boulogne-sur-Mer, France
- Vidin, Bulgaria
- Banoštor, Serbia
So my hunch tells me that it could be that this sausage was originally called baloney because the Bologna city back then was called Bononia. After the city changed it’s name, they didn’t change the way the sausage was pronounced, and when it was added into the English dictionary, it took the pronunciation of the original Bononia, but used the modern name of Bologna as the spelling.
Fascinating…