Feeding Me a Line of Bullshit
Sometimes you've gotta call a spade a stinking pile of horseshit. You know the deal: You're sitting at work, bored out of your skull, and BS is no longer cutting it. You need something forceful. Hilarious. Eloquent. Fortunately, Mark Peters, card-carrying member of the American Dialect Society who happens to write the Best Joke Ever column for McSweeney's, has your number. Here, in an excerpt from his new book, Bullshit: A Lexicon (Three Rivers Press), Peters shares five colorful phrases to add to your vocabulary. —Jill Krasny
Applesauce
It's obvious why some words become synonyms for bullshit. Horseshit and rubbish aren't highly valued, to say the least.
But applesauce? That origin isn't so clear. Maybe this term was influenced by horse apples, a euphemism for horseshit. Or maybe applesauce tasted like pure crap to someone, because this has been a synonym for nonsense since at least the 1920s. Often it means lies or flattery, as in this example from Ring Lardner Jr.'s The Love Nest and Other Stories: "I wasn't born yesterday and I know apple sauce when I hear it, and I bet you've told that to 50 girls."
The word can also be used a simple dismissal of something. If a friend said, "I heard you hate nachos," you could reply, "Applesauce!" as a firm denial. Then you could tell your friend to make up for the insult by buying you nachos.
Bananas
The banana is the craziest fruit. But bananas—and banana oil—can also mean bullshit.
Besides the close relationship between bullshit and craziness, this term is inspired by amyl acetate solution—which is nicknamed banana liquid or banana oil for its smell and is used in various foods and medicines.
English writer and humorist P. G. Wodehouse used this term in his 1960 novel Jeeves in the Offing, mentioning "the sort of banana oil that passes between statesmen at conferences conducted in an atmosphere of the utmost cordiality before they tear their whiskers off and get down to cases." Apparently, it was the smoothness of banana oil that led to its being used as a term for flattery and other smooth talk. If you didn't have the relevant facts or a strong argument, you had to resort to banana oil. Slippery liquids go well with slippery words.
You can also shout "Bananas!" if "Hogwash!" and "Bunk!" have gotten tiresome. F. Scott Fitzgerald used that sense of the word in 1940's Pat Hobby Stories, as the title character responded to some hurtful accusations with "Aw, bananas." That response was equivalent to "Come on, man. That's not true."
Gobshite
Do you know anyone who talks a lot of shit? That person is a gobshite, which literally means mouth shit and figuratively means a loudmouth, especially a dumb one.
This mostly Irish word first turns up as a term for a seaman in the U.S. Navy in the early 1900s. By the mid-20th century it can be found referring to a fool, then a fool with a big mouth. Its 1986 use in John Hockey's Squaddies: Portrait of a Subculture is characteristic, as the author describes a sergeant who "was a regular gobshite always shouting at you in barracks."
Another sense of gob may have influenced this word: It's been a verb meaning spitting and a noun for a wad of spit. As seen in words like drivel and palaver, spit is never far from the bullshit lexicon.
This very popular word can be found everywhere from Irish newspapers to the title of literary magazine the Gobshite Quarterly. The world is full of gobshites. If we ever run out of them, I'll be gobsmacked.
Newspeak
Some BS words have a more literary pedigree than others, and that's certainly true of this word coined by George Orwell in his famous dystopian novel 1984, published in 1949.
Newspeak isn't quite a language: It is a group of mostly compound terms such as goodsex and crimethink. Their overall purpose is control: That's why newspeak caught on as a term for language that seems determined to stifle thought rather than convey it.
Nowadays any kind of baffling or coercive language used by politicians or the media could be labeled newspeak, particularly euphemisms. In Counterpunch, Abby Martin discusses vile terms such as mowing the lawn (mowing down civilians) and other revolting uses of language: "Disturbing Newspeak phrases that absolve their pillaging and mass murder have permeated society and warped our interpretation of reality." That's the essence of newspeak: thought control.
This word launched the suffix -speak, which can be found in words such as management-speak, teacher-speak, and parent-speak.
It's a tough world. Even if you elude Big Brother, there's no escape from Big Bullshit.
Many people have probably looked at Jackson Pollock's artwork—in all its paint-splattering, abstract glory—and thought, "That's bullshit." Some may feel that Niagara Falls is like a leaky faucet compared to the Grand Canyon, and therefore bullshit.
However, there's a simpler explanation for why these terms are in the bullshit lexicon: You can blame Cockney rhyming slang. Niagara Falls rhymes with balls, and Jackson Pollock rhymes with bollock. So just as apples and pears means stairs, these names took on new meanings—for testicles and nonsense.
Whether a load of Niagara Falls is more bullshit than a bunch of Jackson Pollocks is hard to say.
Trumpery
Here's a BS word with a long history and many specific purposes, tiny and tricky though they may be.
The first was a type of hornswoggling. Trumpery was originally practiced by criminals and scam artists. Like so many other words related to trickery and bridge selling, the word shifted to mean more general nonsense, this one in the 1400s. Oxford English Dictionary examples often involve something mystical or woo-woo: There's a mention of "metaphysical trumpery," and superstition and Freemasonry both get lumped with trumpery. A Ouija board is a good example of trumpery.
Insignificance is also key to trumpery. If something matters at all, it can't be trumpery. Internet outrage is a good example of trumpery: If someone is treating a magazine cover (featuring, say, airbrushing or breast-feeding) as though it were the second coming of Stalin, that's trumpery: a trumped-up triviality.
A 2013 review of the movie Adore in the San Francisco Chronicle embraces the distracting, unwanted essence of trumpery: "There's so much trumpery on parade, including a relentless air of self-importance, that it's even hard to simply enjoy the performances of the two stars, who give more than the film deserves." Sounds like it could have been a good movie if not for the pretentious BS.
Reprinted from Bullshit: A Lexicon.Copyright © 2015 by Mark Peters. Published by Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company.
defilippoalmou1979.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a39290/5-ways-to-call-bs/
Post a Comment for "Feeding Me a Line of Bullshit"