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Bullshirt by example? (please excuse the ungainly euphemism) The topic is an important one. We're surrounded by bullshirt, up to our ears in it every day: the self-aggrandizing attempts to do on an amateur basis what a spin-doctor does for a living. Frankfurt does an adequate job with the etymology of bullshirt, where the word was first recorded, contrasting it to misdirections of other kinds, and even starting to give examples of everyday bullshirt -- -- and then stops short. That leaves us with a dry, academic, and unmemorable treatise on bullshirt. With no loss of academic rigor, this could have been so much more. Think of the self-aggrandizing written records of Benvenuto Cellini and Salvador Dali. There's plenty of propagandizing bullshirt to work with, including the overblown body counts from the Vietnam war and twisted truths used in in pushing any agenda. There's large and lively field of bullshirt to be explored in the perpetual motion and "Einstein was wrong" pseudoscience communities, and faux-spiritual New-Aginess. How about the trash-talk of athletes, psyching themselves up before a game or a fight? If ever a Nobel prize were given for bullshirt, the first should go to Alan D. Sokal, for his classic "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." That wonderful piece of writing was intended as social commentary for some readers, satire for others, and of course bullshirt aimed at the magazine that published it. There is ironically little irony in how its greatness overshadowed the truckloads of whining bullshirt responses that it engendered. But Frankfurt gave us none of that. Instead we see why so many people consider philosophical analysis to be dusty, irrelevent word games, just another steaming heap that that has no purpose in the real world. This really could have been more. //wiredweird