the.com/baloney
The polite word for bullshit you can say in front of your grandmother.
means Nonsense, exaggeration, or deceptive talk — words that sound substantial but have no truth inside them.
from Baloney is just a respelling of bologna, the mild Italian sausage padded out with scraps and filler. By the early 1900s American slang had picked up 'bologna' to mean cheap, padded nonsense — talk that's all filler and no meat, like the sausage. The spelling 'baloney' stuck as the slang version, letting it live its own life away from the lunch meat. Boxer-turned-politician lore credits various tough-talking figures for popularizing it, but the sausage link is the solid part — the rest is seasoning.
- origin
- Named after Bologna, the sausage, not the city's pride
- linguistic trick
- Sounds silly enough to defuse the insult
- synonym lineage
- Related to malarkey, another sausage-free nonsense word
- peak usage
- 1930s slang for political nonsense, still accurate