The line between friendly banter and insult is razor thin.  Teasing and making fun of each other is so common place since our toddler years that it’s difficult to view it as BS.  The reality is that most of it was probably inappropriate yet from our youth we accepted it as such.  Anytime you try to bring someone down to any degree is an attack, and an attack is violation of commandment 10 – having indecent regard for others.  When someone says “you can’t take a joke,” or “you’re just sensitive,” it is a violation of commandment 5 – a misrepresentation of their true tone, commandment 7 – a deflection of their inappropriate action re-aimed to your alleged character flaw, which of course they don’t have the authority to make,a violation of commandment 8 – assuming false authority. And last but not least, it is another violation of commandment 10 on top of that from the original joke.

This is just one of hundreds of examples of how a single sentence can violate more rules of BS than there are words present.  Because most BS is such a medley of different combinations of BS it is often difficult to articulate just why it is so.

Does this mean you’re allowed to bite someone’s head off anytime they make an inappropriate joke and say one of these?  Unlikely, as that would qualify you as over-reacting and exaggerating, also a major form of BS (more on that for another time).   It does however give you the knowledge to disempower anyone that uses this common line.  They are generally using it to reassign blame to you.   Anyone who says one of these lines is probably the asshole.  

There may be times where it was intended as banter and was an attempt to add humor to the situation.  In this instance the person will not usually resort to these common lines of BS but should take accountability for their words and apologize.

A small sample of the types of BS you see in the world. Stay tuned as we break down the most common and most elusive.

Often we feel it without being able to describe it. This ubiquitous, yet surprisingly obscure concept we generalize as “BS,” can be categorized in an infinite number of ways. The ten commandments presented here is just a single iteration and are certainly not perfect. There is plenty of overlap, and redundancy particular in the second half. But perhaps that is appropriate as BS is often vague and comes in multiple flavors. Very rarely do they violate just a single rule, but rather multiple ones simultaneously, using these commandments as building blocks to create every manifestation of itself.