Bullshit is now a theoretical framework, a philosophical construct. But it hasn’t lost its relevance as an expletive; it’s considered to be vulgar slang and is used universally by the commoner and the world’s elite. But the history of bullshit and the story of its evolution is quirky, wacky, and weird.
The history of Bullshit starts with TS Eliot. The word bullshit is his contribution to the English language. Between 1910 and 1916, he wrote a poem titled The Triumph of Bullshit in the form of a Ballad. Though the text of the poem does not mention the word Bullshit, in the last one hundred years or so, this “distinctively modern linguistic innovation” has become one of the most commonly used terms in the English language.
The earliest citations for Bullshit are from the British writer Wyndham Lewis and the American essayist E. E. Cummings, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. “Elliot has sent me Bullshit and the Ballad for Big Louise. They are excellent bits of scholarly ribaldry,” writes Lewis, on 2 February 1915; “When we asked him once what he thought about the war, he replied, ‘I t’ink a lotta bullshit,’ writes Cummings in Enormous Room vii.
Some authors, however, are reluctant to bestow the honour of inventing the word Bullshit entirely to TS Eliot. They argue that the word “bull” has been in use at least from the seventeenth century before it morphed into its modern avatar – bullshit. Read, for instance, what Jim Holt of The New Yorker has to say:
-30-
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to [email protected]
