Locate responsibility · Claim Check companion
The Bullshit Glossary
A field guide to language designed to sound more informative, scientific, or evidentiary than it is. This is not a test of whether a consumer is savvy enough to decode advertising. The company making money from a claim is responsible for making that claim clear and supporting it.
Bullshit has a grammar
Watch a claim assemble itself.
Advertising can combine an authority cue, a biological target, a soft verb, and a desirable outcome. The sentence sounds specific while leaving the seller room to avoid a measurable promise.
These are invented demonstrations, not quotations from an advertiser. Changing the words does not supply product evidence.
Who benefits from ambiguity?
Vague language leaves the seller room to move.
“Supports metabolic wellness” can evoke a health outcome without stating a measured change. A precise claim would name the population, product, dose, comparison, outcome, size of effect, and uncertainty. The seller chooses the wording and profits from the impression; the seller owns the burden of showing that the advertised result follows.
The governing principle
The burden belongs upstream.
You should not need a degree in chemistry, physiology, statistics, nutrition, or advertising to discover what a company means by the words it chose. If a seller uses technical language, invokes science, names a mechanism, or implies evidence, the burden of making that claim intelligible and substantiating it belongs to the seller.
This glossary examines commercial language. It does not diagnose motives, and inclusion does not by itself establish that a product is ineffective or that a claim is legally deceptive. It asks what the wording communicates, what it leaves unstated, and what evidence would be needed to support the impression it creates.
Receipts are linked where the wording was verified on a seller’s page. The remaining entries describe recurring patterns and are not presented as quotations from a particular company. Product pages can change; the capture date records when the wording was reviewed. Analysis of a missing evidentiary step does not establish that the seller has no evidence elsewhere.
Educational resource only. Examples should be read in the context of the specific advertisement or product language in which they appear.