Now is the time for bullshitters to face the music they never wanted to hear and their victims or audience always wanted to hear but were afraid to play. Could it be that a person's success is largely determined by how well he is able to detect bullshit?  
       "Bullshit is a term I detect myself using in thinking or verbalizing, in recent years more tthan before. Usually, this is my response to some pronouncement I hear in the form of an advertisement, propaganda or political demagoguery.  I use the term unapologetically and with conviction that it best expresses what I think, believe and feel about what I am responding to.
       Any reluctance I had in using the term was removed from my psyche several years ago, after I read the book  "On Bullshit," by Henry Frankfurt, a moral philosopher and professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University. He contends that the concept is related to but distinct from lying and observes that there is "the contemporary proliferation of  bullshit." While my take on bullshit is similar in some rspects to that of Frankfurt's, it differs as is noted in my definition of bullshit to be presented later. Perhaps, it is because of the many ways that are now available for people to communicate because of new technologies and social media that include Facebook, Twitter Google and cellular phones, bullshit is more plentiful and more difficult for a person to avoid being bombarded or saturated with in today's world.
      Before defining bullshit, allow me to say a word about raw or real bullshit as I experienced it during my boyhood. Having been raised on a farm and priviieged, at least I thought that to be true at the time, to tend cows and to observe them giving birth to calves (heifers), one of my chores was to literally handle bullshit, i.e, to collect it and use it to fertilize vegetables such as peas and corn. I did not make a distincion between bull  shit and heifershit or female cow shit. Although then, as now, shit was considered to be a vulgar or profane term. I was taught or learned to call bullshit "cow mature" or " cow poop." I rccall, however, that bullshit, male cow excrement, did appear to be greater in volume per animal, and had a stronger scent or odor per animal than heifer, a young female calf, or shit from a female cow (beyond the age of two or three years of age.) Apparently, the stronger scent or odor of bullshit from a male cow resulted from quantity,  nothing more, but I am not sure.
      Bullshit is an English explettive which may be shortened to the euphemism "bull" or B.S, not to be confused with the B.S. degree; although I recall having heard it used by people who referred to those having  received B.S. Degrees. Bullshit, as I understand and employs the term, in my thinking and expression, is a blatant lie, even if framed as a "white lie" a fragrant (to the bullshitter) untruth, nonsense and disingenuous .It misrepresents the facts and endeavors to deceive a person into believing a falsehood. How I define bullshit makes the concept somewhast different from Frankfurt's understanding but.it  includes his understanding of the term.
      I have no better term and know no better way to refute a lie or half-truth, and respond to much of what I hear than to simply think or say "bullshit!" primarily to address bullshitters' rhetoric. Like many one-words such as beautiful, ugly, wonderful and so on that expresses adequately one's intent, for me bullshit singular and without superfluous words declares the truth effectively and fully what I think or choose to verbally express.
      Ernest Hemingway attrributed his success as a writer to "being able to have a built in shockproof  'crap' (bullshit) detector " By detecting the bullshit anyone can increase his or her success and happiness.
      Although I could say much more about bullshit, in an attempt to equal the quantity of bullshit I have encountered and is presently available, probably like Frankfurt, wrirte a book about it, I rest my case, with the awareness that  readers got the message I have endeavored to convey.
       In the future how do you intend to face bulshitters' rhetoric?

Copyright 2013 and 2019 by Uraih J. Fields.