183 Bullshitter

I’m sorry if the title offends you but if you survived reading the “f word” 78 times in my last offering, I’m sure you can cope with it.

I was emailed by a friend who holds an important position in the education department of a local authority in the north of England.  He is responsible for the progress of schools in the care of the council.

Recently, one of those schools underwent an Ofsted inspection and to no one’s great surprise, it was found to be “inadequate and needing special measures”.

“One of the main contributory factors,” he wrote, “is that the Headteacher is a bullshitter.  Next month, I have the difficulty of how I get that important aspect of the problem across to the education committee without using the actual word, ‘bullshitter’.  Have you any ideas about a synonym or a concise phrase that I can use in a professional environment?”

It is a funny word, bullshitter.  Everyone knows exactly what it means but defining it succinctly is difficult and as far as I can tell, there is no synonym.  No thesaurus I’ve found even mentions it.  

Just as the phrase “economical with the truth” means lying and no one ever has to explain it, we all know what a bullshitter is.

Dictionary definitions include several descriptive words but even when they are aligned in a group, the critical essence of a “bullshitter” is missing: 

exaggerates; rodomontade; lies; arrogant; gasconader; poseur; hogwash;  deceitful.

It is interesting that three of those descriptors (poseur, gasconader and rodomontade) have their origins in the French language but it’s probably best if I don’t develop that interesting aspect any further.  I don’t want to offend anybody and run the risk of being cancelled.

As I have copious free time nowadays, I spent a long time looking into bullshit.  I promise you that I washed my hands afterwards.

Apparently, and to my surprise, I found that the word “bullshit” is not derived from bovine excrement.  Bullshit comes from the “bull” that soldiers had to do to keep their kit spotless.  

In the army, the term “bulling” referred to the cleaning of a soldier’s kit by spit and polish, a practice that has no practical application other than to present an image of exemplary cleanliness.   Soldiers hoped to successfully “bullshit” the sergeant who inspected an item that had been cleaned.

Phrases that were suggested to me for my friend to use included, “Dissembles with credibility”; “Shows disarming dissemblance” and “Promoted beyond their professional, pedagogical and managerial competence”.  (I met plenty of those during my teaching career).  All those suggestions capture aspects of the bullshitter but without nailing the intrinsic character of the condition.

It was pointed out that whenever you hear that someone is a bullshitter, the immediate assumption is that the person is male and the suggestion was made that women cannot or do not, bullshit.  Really?  Could it be that perhaps they can and do but are infinitely better at disguising it than men?

No, I don’t think so.  I have met many bullshitters and they have all, without exception, been men.  It is just possible that even I may have been guilty of bullshitting occasionally

One of the people I asked to help got carried away and composed this limerick:

There was an old rodomontade

Whose prestige was immutably marred

When a wild gasconader

Behaved like a raider

And left the old man feeling jarred.

I think that “bullshitter” must join “twat” as an insult that everyone knows the meaning of but finds impossible to define succinctly.  A twat is much more than just an idiot or a stupid person.  There’s something slightly malevolent about a twat.

In January 2017, you may have read my account of a holiday task a friend’s 10-year-old grandson was given by his teacher.  I was asked to help.

GRAMIL, GRAMIL, EDDCHA ALEHIG, CLITHO, PERMAN - who comes next?

The question informs us that they are names and the first is repeated.  

Eventually, I discovered that the names were snooker players: Graham Miles, Graham Miles, Eddie Charlton, Alex Higgins, Cliff Thorburn and Perrie Mans.  But who came next?

After even more fastidious research, I found that these players were the runners-up (not even the winners) in the World Snooker Championship from 1974 until 1978.  The runner-up in 1979 was Denis Taylor and so the next name on the list is DENTAY.  What???  

To ask a class of children to tackle a task like that means that the teacher is most definitely a twat and I bet a bullshitter too and so, Watson, my deduction is…... that teacher is a man.