Have you ever wondered how male bovine excrement became synonymous with boldfaced nonsense? Many would say, ‘Well, because shit smells’. But why the shit of bulls in particular? Are bull pies a particularly smelly brand of animal waste? You might think it’s similar to the phrase ‘pee like a racehorse’ which has a very good reason to be associated with horses. But no. The etymology of bullshit actually has nothing to do with male cattle.
You may think bull came about as a censored version of the original bullshit. But as it happens, bull is actually the original term dating all the way back to the Middle Ages. Bull as a synonym for ‘deceitful foolishness’ comes from the Old French word bole, meaning ‘deception, trick, scheming, intrigue’ 1. Somewhere along the way, a brilliant soul made the connection between bull and cow paddies and now we have bullshit.
The Difference Between ‘Bullshit’ and ‘Lies’
It’s also important to make the distinction between bullshit and lies. Harry Frankfurt, the foremost academic on the subject, says that a lie “requires that the liar makes his statement in a certain state of mind—namely, with an intention to deceive.” 2 A lie is purposeful. A lie must know the truth, and then cover it up.
But Frankfurt makes the point that bullshit “is ‘short of lying’ that while it has some of the characteristics of lies, there are others that it lacks.” An orator spouting bullshit would be lying
only if it were his intention to bring about in his audience beliefs that he himself regards as false… But the orator does not really care what his audience thinks… what makes…oration [bullshit] is not fundamentally that the speaker regards his statement as false. Rather…the orator intends these statements to convey a certain impression of himself. He is not trying to deceive anyone…What he cares about is what people think of him.
A liar must know the truth in order to actively conceal it. But a bullshiter doesn’t care what the truth is.
Norman Mailer’s ‘Factoids’
How about another fun fact? Did you know the word factoid is synonymous with bullshit? Though people often use it to mean ‘a true but insignificant statement’, a more precise word is actually factlet.
Factoid, on the other hand, was coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marylin Monroe to mean “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.” 3 In essence, it’s all bullshit.
- “Bull” | Online Etymology Dictionary
- Frankfurt, Harry | “On Bullshit” | Raritan Quarterly Review | 1986
- Mailer, Norman | Marylin: A Biography | 1973