Where “Bullshit” Comes From
For a word that turns up in so many boardrooms, at least in the minds of the people sitting in them, “bullshit” is surprisingly young. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates it to 1914, as American slang for “eloquent and insincere rhetoric”. It’s a definition that could have been written for half the keynote speeches I’ve sat through, and possibly one or two of my own early ones.
The obvious explanation for the word is the bull itself, along with the rich and unmistakable aroma of what it leaves behind. That’s probably part of it. But the more interesting story is that “bull” had been doing this job on its own for centuries before anyone thought to add the second syllable.
In Middle English, “bull” meant false talk or fraud. It seems to have come from the Old French bole, meaning deception, a trick or a scheme. In a Northumbrian poem from the early 1300s called Cursor Mundi, Christ tells the hypocrites they are full of wickedness, treason and bull. So the next time someone objects to the language in your strategy review, you can point out that you’re in fairly distinguished company.
By the 1530s, English also had a verb “to bull”, meaning to mock or cheat someone. And in the 1600s, the language picked up the “Irish bull”, a statement so confidently contradictory that it collapses as you listen. The English, being English, decided this was a characteristically Irish habit, which tells you a fair bit about the English. My favourite examples are attributed to the eighteenth-century politician Sir Boyle Roche, who once asked the Irish parliament why anyone should do anything for posterity, “for what, in the name of goodness, has posterity done for us?” He also observed that the best way to avoid danger was to meet it plump. I’ve worked with several executives who would have made him proud.
There’s also the papal bull, which has nothing to do with nonsense, whatever you might think of some of them. It comes from the Latin bulla, the seal attached to an official document. The word originally meant a round swelling or bubble, which is a fairly good image for a lot of official communication even so.
Around the time the modern word appeared, T.S. Eliot is said to have written a poem called “The Triumph of Bullshit”. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t make it into the school anthologies. By the 1940s, “bullshit” had become a verb as well as a noun, and soldiers in two world wars had carried it into every corner of the English-speaking world, where it has been put to steady use ever since.
What changed the word’s fortunes was a philosopher. In 1986, Harry Frankfurt published an essay called “On Bullshit”, which came out as a small book in 2005 and became one of the least likely bestsellers in the history of academic philosophy. His point was that bullshit is different from lying. A liar knows the truth and works to hide it, so in a backhanded way, the liar still cares about the truth. The bullshitter doesn’t care either way. What matters is the impression being made, and whether the words happen to be true is beside the point.
That distinction explains a lot about modern business language. Very few corporate documents are lies. The annual report isn’t usually fraudulent, and the values statement on the kitchen wall wasn’t written to deceive anyone. But a great deal of it was written to create an impression, with no real interest in whether it described anything that actually happens. “We put our people first” sounds lovely. Whether it’s true is something you’ll find out the first time you ask for leave in December.
Which is why I think the old Middle English sense is still worth hanging on to. Long before it acquired its farmyard ending, “bull” simply meant talk you couldn’t trust. That’s still the best test I know. Not whether a sentence is offensive, or clumsy, or even wrong, but whether you can rely on it to mean what it says.
By that standard, the word has never been more useful.
