we are informed early on that, while "one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit", the phenomenon is "so vast and amorphous that no crisp and perspicuous analysis of its concept can avoid being procrustean".

Of course, the suggestion all bullshit is necessarily uncrafted collides head-on with our use of that allied term, bullshit artist. But Frankfurt has a ready answer to this conundrum, and it takes us to the heart of his project, which is to distinguish the concept of bullshit from straight-out lying.

In fact, while lying is a craft, bullshitting is a kind of art; instead of extracting nuggets of truth from an account and substituting them with lies, the bullshit artist uses "improvisation, colour and imaginative play" to create a more spacious account in which there operates, as it were, a suspension of disbelief.

Thirty years ago, when he said he did not know about the Watergate break-in, Richard Nixon was lying. But when former NSW premier Bob Carr promised last year that Sydney's rail services would achieve "more robust on-time running" under his administration, he was simply bullshitting.

US philosopher Richard Rorty was suggesting something similar in his famous aside about Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction: "He's given bullshit a bad name."

Wasn't lies, it was just... bullshit