[Ads-l] Early Citations for "Bullshit"

[Shapiro, Fred]

If you looked at the very small Wikipedia article about me, you would think that my major accomplishment was a 2002 article that, using legal documents, antedated the words "motherfucking" and "cocksucking" and presented the earliest known openly printed U.S. occurrence of the word "fuck."  Now I have similar information about the word "bullshit."

The OED records a very high-end literary pedigree for "bullshit," including a manuscript poem by T. S. Eliot (ca. 1910) as the earliest citation.  Brilliant research by Ben Zimmer and Jon Lighter and Bonnie Taylor-Blake has uncovered a number of older citations that consist of newspaper typos that may have been intentional, or conjectures that "B-- S-- Jack" stands for the nickname "Bull Shit Jack."

The "Making of Modern Law" database of trial accounts, created by me in collaboration with the Gale publishing company, has two pre-1910 occurrences of "bullshit."  The first one appears to be a literal use of the word.  The United States Supreme Court case of The State of Missouri vs. The State of Illinois and The Sanitary District of Chicago includes, in Volume 4 of testimony transcripts, the following exchange on July 23, 1903 (testimony by J. E. Dalrymple):

Q.  As to moss or slime in the river, what was its condition ?
A.  There was lots of slime in that country at that time.
Q.  What kind of looking material was it ?
A.  Why it was a white colored slime; I don't know what you would call it; we used to call it bull-shit down there.

"Making of Modern Law" also has an apparently straightforward figurative use of "bullshit."  The Illinois General Assembly published a document titled "Special Investigating Committee Appointed By Hon. Edward D. Shurtleff, Speaker in Accordance with House Resolution No. 78 and Resolutions Amendatory Thereto January 14, 1908."  On page 898, column 2, transcribing testimony at an April 18, 1908 hearing about punishment at an Illinois hospital for the insane, appears the following:

The WITNESS:  He said he would kick my puddin' out and called me a "damn liar" and said he would knock my head off.  Said the big fellas had been throwing this hot air bull shit into him all the time and he wouldn't stand for it.

Fred Shapiro




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