Peters Mark. - Bullshit: A Lexicon

Like you, I hate bullshit. But I kind of love it tooat least the words for it.

Malarkey! Bunk! Mule fritters! Flubdub! Selling wolf tickets! All my eye and Betty Martin!

Who wouldnt love words like that? The lingo of bullshit is earthy, silly, bonkers, and fun. And (at the risk of mansplaining) its a lot bigger than you think.

Ive been writing about words for over ten years and in dozens of publications. I write about euphemisms, new words, slang, etc. But while writing about lexical this and linguistic that, I kept getting drawn to words for bullshit.

At first I didnt know the BS vocabulary went beyond well-known words such as mumbo jumbo, balderdash, tommyrot, rubbish, and crapola. But then I would stumble upon a word like skimble-skamble: a rare term used by Shakespeare that can mean bullshit. Id notice that flummery has wild variations like flummadiddle. Id learn a great idiom like the British all gas and gaiters. Sometimes a BS word would enter my life more dramatically: I was lucky enough to be at the American Dialect Society meeting that voted truthiness 2005s Word of the Year. Word by word, I noticed there were far more terms for bullshit than I had ever imagined. My own searches in the Oxford English Dictionaryand the generous assistance of dictionary editors such as Jonathon Green (Greens Dictionary of Slang) and Joan Hall (Dictionary of American Regional English)confirmed it. BS is all over the English language, like horse apples on a country road.

This book explores that lexicon, giving a tour of more than two hundred words and phraseswell-known and obscure, filthy and euphemisticthat mean bullshit (or something with a very strong whiff of it). Along the way, youll also find a few words for bullshitters and bullshitting.

So what is bullshit? In his great essay On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt distinguishes BS from lies. As Frankfurt explains, The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong. For Frankfurt, lies and bullshit exist in parallel universes, independent of each other. The bullshitter is more of a poser than a liar.

But language is slippery, and we use the word bullshit for many things. There is a bullshit spectrum, which includes the following, in order of decreasing complexity:

scams

lies

gossip

empty boasts

sentimental crap

insignificant things

rubbish

gibberish

Words that apply to a specific type of bullshit tend to eventually get applied to other forms too. For example, mumbo jumbo was originally superstitious nonsense, but the word can now be used for virtually any type of bullshit. Trumpery still tends to be used most often for the insignificant type of bullshit, but its sometimes used more broadly. Treacle refers to sentimental, phony bullshit, and its stayed close to that meaning. Each BS word has its own range of meaning, but theyre all linkedwith bullshit at the center.

Just as certain types of soil are more conducive to farming and certain bars are more conducive to brawling, there are a few subject areas and word types that tend to produce bullshit words.