Bulls–t may be easy to dismiss, but from politics and gambling to advertising and public relations, it can obscure truth, shape debate and carry serious consequences.

Bulls–t is not just harmless fun – it has serious consequences for our lives.

Whenever I hear a prerecorded message say “Your call is important to us” I don’t know whether to laugh or scream, because Your Call is Important to Us is the title of a book by Laura Penny that is subtitled “The Truth about Bulls–t”. It is described as a “guide through the phoniness of advertising and public relations, the claptrap of big pharma, the gobbledygook of the media, and the poppycock of the service industry”.

If your call really was important to them, they would have hired enough receptionists to be able to attend to your call in a timely manner. Except, of course, when they are “currently experiencing a higher-than-normal volume of calls”. But if the recorded message says this every time you phone, this means that the current high volume of calls is the normal one. So they’re bulls–tting.

The first serious treatment of bulls–t in human communication was by Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. In the 1980s he wrote a short essay entitled “On Bulls–t” for an obscure academic philosophy journal. Then in 2005 an enterprising publisher published it as a monograph and it struck a chord with the populace and became a bestseller, spending 27 weeks on The New York Times’ bestseller list.

Frankfurt’s main contribution to our understanding of bulls–t was to distinguish it from lying. Frankfurt claimed that while lying involves deliberately making a false claim, the hallmark of bulls–t is that the person saying it doesn’t care whether what they’re saying is true or false. Thus, while lying is a deliberate falsehood, bulls–t can often........

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