“There are similarities between hot air and excrement,
incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable
equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been
emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from
which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be
regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the
vital elements in food have been exhausted. In this respect,
excrement is a representation of death which we ourselves
produce and which, indeed, we cannot help producing in the very
process of maintaining our lives. Perhaps it is for making death so
intimate that we find excrement so repulsive. In any event, it
cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air
can serve those of communication.”