Bullshit, also bullcrap, frogcrap, bullplop, or horseshit, is a common English expletive. It can also be shortened to just "Bull", and in polite use, it is referred to by the euphemism bs.
Most commonly, it describes tautological, incorrect, misleading, or false language and statements. Literally, it describes the feces of a bull. As with many expletives, it can be used as an interjection (or in many other parts of speech) and can carry a wide variety of meanings.
Bullshitting is usually used to describe statements that are false, or made-up. Usually people describe other people's action of making a lot of statements as bullshitting in arguments, when one is making up rules or making examples that are not anything to do with what they are discussing or when one is making statements by using examples that need different rules to be applied, so this person is bullshitting
As it contains the word "shit" the term is usually considered foul language, hence the use of the euphemistic abbreviations "bull" and "BS". Nonetheless, the term is prevalent in American English and, as with many words, the term is used in a variety of countries, some dating back to approximately the same era World War I. In British English, bollocks is a comparable expletive, although bullshit is now a commonly used expletive in British English also.
While bullshit can be used in a deprecating sense, the term 'bullshit artist' may imply a measure of respect for the skill required to "bullshit" effectively.
In popular explanations of philosophy, the word bullshit is used to denote utterances and speech acts which does not add to the meaning of the set of sentences uttered, but which is added purely to persuade interlocutors of the validity or importance of other utterances. The accuracy of the information is irrelevant whilst "bullshitting"; whether true or false, "bullshit" is the intention to distort the information or to otherwise achieve a desirable outcome, making "bullshit" a close cousin to rhetoric as Plato conceived it. The philosophical use of the term was first systematically described by Harry Frankfurt (see below), but has been used longer than that, for instance by proponents of Analytical Marxism. .
