Words: baloney, n.

Christopher Hawtree
Wednesday 30 June 1999 23:02 BST
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"AND TELL me what street / Compares with Mott Street / In July?/ We'll go to Coney / And eat baloney / On a roll." Even more extraordinary than a producer's telling Rodgers and Hart that their musical Winkle Town contained nothing memorable is Hart's being absent from the OED.

Baloney, as sausage, comes from Bologna in the 16th century. The OED doubts any such link in the sense of foolishness, but Ramon Adams notes that such sausages are made from inferior bulls; and a hint of blarney is detected by Jonathan Lighter, whose first, 1920 citation (Variety) is a decade earlier than that in the OED, which overlooks meanings from the same era: automobile tyre and penis. A Casanova could, then, pun "My baloney's on a roll."

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