Check out this Google Ngram of the word ‘bullshit’. See that blip in the late 1800s? Zooming in to the 1880s, there are two peaks (1884 and 1888). Clicking the ‘search Google Books’ doesn’t reveal much.
Why does the blip disappear if you change to British or other language variants? If it’s just their OCR is misidentifying the word, why did it happen for a pair of years in that decade and not semi-random throughout? What kind of bullshit is that?
Given the small numbers involved, I wouldn’t be surprised if that is from a single book that included the word. Such things were not common in English language publications in those days. Remember, even in the 1930’s saying “damn” in a movie was considered quite provocative.
Thanks. I’m not all that familiar with the Ngram interface–since it’s picking up a bit of data, is there any way to tell where that bit came from? The search links don’t seem to be pointing to the underlying data. I’d love to find out that, say Mark Twain actually coined the word in an obscure essay that someone picked up on in the 1940s.
Go to the Fortean society, there was a huge flurry of unexplained activity in the 1880s, the Devon devils hoofprints, deluges of falling frogs, UFO equivalents and all that. Maybe a lot of contemporary reporting of the incidents called them bullshit.
According to the internets neither bullshit nor horseshit was seen in print until the 1900s.
But the word shit is near a thousand years old, and imagine it was combined with numerous animals well before that. In speech and print. Would be interesting if the Ngram yields an earlier source.
The earliest I could find use the word is by T.S. Elliot of all people, who wrote an unpublished poem, an early version of which written in 1910, called “The Triumph of Bullshit”, which rather pleasingly ends;*
And when thyself with silver foot shall pass
Among the theories scattered on the grass
Take up my good intentions with the rest
And then for Christ’s sake stick them up your ass.
*
That just proves that they took profanity seriously back then. It doesn’t reflect at all on their attitudes towards obscenities. And yes, there is a difference. Nowadays, the “worst” words all deal with biology: “Fuck”, or “shit”, or “cunt”. But there was a time when those words were commonplace, and the really bad words were the spiritual ones, like “damn” and “Hell”.
I limited the search to 1880 to 1900, and the first several examples were just poor recognition of other words. ETA: Yeah the whole first page doesn’t have a single real instance of “bullshit”.
What a fascinating site. What exactly is it? What books are they searching through for their data?
Recognizing the possibilities I at once ran through the more titillating dirty words gleaning such facts as.
If you set the smoothing to 20 you get much easier to read graphs.
They were probably written as two words…(or does the program factor that possibility in?)
Base Ball was written that way until…I’m not sure when.
The two words aren’t really comparable.
“Nigger” has always been a pejorative. “Negro” was used as a neutral descriptor well into the 70s/80s.
I thought it was less of a pejorative way back when. In fact, throughout Huckleberry Finn, they refer to his companion as “nigger Jim”, even people who aren’t putting him down. It may be somewhat pejorative, but appears to be equally just descriptive.
It may also come from a side effect of the local accent. If you listen to MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech, he pronounces “negro” as “nigroh” over and over. (short i) Shortening words that are used commonly is typical.
IMHO the offense appears to come from the context - deliberately using a slang version of the word, and the slang version used by the oppressing majority, is a deliberate choice to be insulting - which has become worse over time, now that the world is no longer “normal” as it appeared to be in Mark Twain’s time, and therefore even more insulting.
The lack of use in print in early times may simply be a reflection of it being a slang word. Print used to be relatively formal (I still remember English teachers being very critical of the use of “ain’t” years ago). Twain was trying to reflect common speech.
Its just the poor quality of the print, and perhaps the phrasing of the text, eg to repeatedly mention a “BILL” when talking about what governments vote for. The more they use the word bill the more chance it will be OCR’d as BULL and so the spelling correction kicks in …
I read someplace that Google Ngram indexes some or all periodicals by their first year of publication rather than the date of the individual issues. This skews the results backwards in time and causes significant clumping.
Marty McFly introduced the word
I was the editor of a couple of university student publications in Australia in the 1960s, so I became very familiar with the law of what could not be printed and published in that era. The words “cunt” and “fuck” were unprintable in Britain, Australia, and other English-speaking countries until the unsuccessful prosecution of Penguin Books in England in 1960 for the publication of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Even the Oxford English Dictionary left them out until they were included inthe supplement of 1972. It’s not that there were any prosecutions before 1960: it’s just that everyone “knew” those two words were unprintable, and you’d never be able to get a commercial printer to put them in a book or magazine.
I have read somewhere (but this could be a folk etymology) that “bull” as a perjorative originated from papal bulls (bulletins) and then bull shit, ultimately, bullshit, as emphatic variations.