Can anyone provide the first documented usage of the term?
Why bull****, and not that of another critter?
Cheers Mike30
I can’t document the first usage, but I HAVE walked in a cow pasture. Bovine excrement is large and messy.
I can give a guess here as to why bulls. You’d want an animal that produces copious amounts of excrement, which probably means a relatively large animal. You also want an animal with which most people are familiar. This pretty much leaves horses and cattle. Now, horse droppings are about half undigested fodder, and are firm and not too unpleasent in odor. Cow (and bull, of course) manure, however, is a runny, stinky mess.
Of course, pig manure is even worse than cow, and they produce a lot of it for their body mass, so this theory may just be full of… Well, you know.
I rather wonder whether there may not be some influence from “cock and bull story,” which IIRC is based on a longwinded narrative in some medieval bestiary. I’ll see if I can find it.
“horseshit” is sometimes used also, as my AHD and memory both attest. “bullshit” is more likely as an exclamation, whereas you may hear “horseshit” used in a sentence. “bullshit” just SOUNDS better.
I dunno, horseshit is sufficiently unpleasant enough for me to dislike deposits of it on hiking trails, though I’ll admit I’m REALLY glad people don’t ride cows for recreation.
A saying I remember from my youth - “whoopee turtle shit”, meaning, roughly, “big deal”, said derisively. Didn’t stay around for long.
DDG has it right if you are looking for the earliest printed use of the term as meaning nonsense.
The oxen drivers from the 1860’s(and earlier) were called “bullwhackers.” The earliest printed use of the term ‘bullshit’ I can find is supplied by Lighter, American Slang. He quotes W.H. Jackson Diaries in 1866 " …our first cry when we corral. It is for fuel and thus spoken–“Bull sh-t, Bull sh-t…”
There was a lack of wood as fuel over much of the West, and the drovers found that oxen-manure when dry burned nicely.
No doubt oxen drivers centuries earlier invented the phrase.
Cuz of the root word:
5bull (1609)
verb transitive
slang : to fool esp. by fast boastful talk
verb intransitive
slang : to engage in idle and boastful talk
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