[Ads-l] bullshit detector

[Jonathan Lighter]

There are plug-ins too, sometimes supplied by education.

On Sat, Jan 22, 2022 at 9:51 AM Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com> wrote:

> Is there a bullshit detector that isn't built-in?
>
> On Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 2:11 AM Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Mike Scott (lead singer of the band The Waterboys) posted a query on
> > Twitter about the phrase "bullshit detector," which he first heard in the
> > 1977 song by The Clash, "Garageland."
> >
> > https://twitter.com/MickPuck/status/1484323204843794432
> >
> > In 1958, Ernest Hemingway famously used the expression "shit-detector" in
> > The Paris Review:
> >
> > ---
> > https://www.theparisreview.org/back-issues/18
> > Ernest Hemingway, "The Art of Fiction No. 21," interview with George
> > Plimpton
> > Paris Review, Vol. 18, Spring 1958
> > The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof
> > shit-detector.
> > ---
> >
> > As for "bullshit detector," the earliest citation that looks legitimate
> on
> > Google Books is from 1969:
> >
> > ---
> > https://books.google.com/books?id=vIxBAAAAIAAJ&q=bullshit (snippet view)
> > Garson Kanin, _Cast of Characters: Stories of Broadway and Hollywood_
> > (1969) , p. 409
> > An indispensable ace with a built-in radar-type bullshit detector.
> > ---
> >
> > The next earliest cite I've found is from 1970:
> >
> > ---
> >
> >
> https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-land-of-the-permanent-wave-is-bud-shrakes-classic-take-on-60s-texas
> > Edwin "Bud" Shrake, "The Land of the Permanent Wave"
> > _Harper's_, Feb. 1970, p. 78 [ProQuest]
> > Dowdy’s bullshit detector had not been functioning while wet, but now
> there
> > was a clattering in the machinery inside his head and he cast a
> suspicious,
> > stricken look at us.
> > ---
> >
> > There's a hit on Google Books snippet view that appears to be from 1967,
> > but it's actually misdated and misidentified. The Google Books record for
> > the volume has the title _Theatre at Work: Playwrights and Productions in
> > the Modern British Theatre: a Collection of Interviews and Essays_
> (1967),
> > but a search on "1973" reveals it's actually Charles Marowitz's
> > _Confessions of a Counterfeit Critic: a London Theatre Notebook,
> 1958-1971_
> > (1973).
> >
> > https://books.google.com/books?id=pzJaAAAAMAAJ&q=bullshit
> > https://books.google.com/books?id=pzJaAAAAMAAJ&q=1973
> >
> > The 1973 book is available on Internet Archive. There you can see that
> the
> > line appears in a commentary on Marowitz's April 1967 Village Voice
> review
> > of a staging of Chekhov's _Three Sisters_.
> >
> > ---
> > https://archive.org/details/confessionsofcou0000maro/page/126/mode/2up
> > Charles Marowitz,  _Confessions of a Counterfeit Critic: a London Theatre
> > Notebook, 1958-1971_, 1973, p. 126
> > Whenever she worked, one could hear her built-in bullshit-detector, that
> > most delicate of all precision instruments, ticking in the background.
> > ---
> >
> > The original Village Voice review is here, and it doesn't have the
> > "bullshit detector" line:
> >
> > https://books.google.com/books?id=mQNOAAAAIBAJ&pg=PA12
> >
> > --bgz
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org