I've just returned from a long weekend in Bologna, Italy, and
there I learnt that the word baloney in baloney sandwich is
named after the town, or rather, the sausage that was first made
in Bologna. Baloney sandwich is not a well-known term in the UK,
but here there is a sausage called polony, and that word, too,
comes from the word Bologna. We use the word baloney, also spelt
boloney, a lot in the UK, but it means 'poppycock' or
'nonsense'. The OED says that the link with Bologna is
'conjectural', but Jonathon Green in his Dictionary of Slang
refers to Ramon Adams, author of Western Words, who says that
Bologna bulls are animals of inferior quality, whose meat is
used to make Bologna sausage. Presumably people found the
sausages inferior or 'rubbish' too, and the nonsense sense
perhaps comes from this connection. Eric Partridge in A
Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English has a different
theory. He thinks that boloney/baloney comes from the Romany
word pelone, meaning testicles, and refers to the anal