What linguistic features are warning signs that a text might be bullshit?

Vagueness, overwrought metaphor, tangled syntax, hidden presuppositions, vague jargon, and strong emotion with no stated basis — language doing work other than conveying clear, checkable claims.

The linguist Jörg Meibauer catalogued indicators of bullshit in language itself. The common thread: the prose resists being pinned down and checked.

• Too many metaphors and comparisons, doing argumentative work a literal claim couldn't.
• Deliberate vagueness and ambiguity — nothing falsifiable to grab onto.
• Convoluted, nested sentence structure that makes the text hard to process.
• Heavy presuppositions and implicatures — smuggling in unstated assumptions.
• Special vocabulary whose meaning doesn't clearly resolve.
• Sweeping generic statements ("X is the new smoking").
• Strong emotional evaluation whose basis stays unclear.
• Incoherence and logic violations (e.g. self-contradiction).
• Reliance on very specific background the reader is unlikely to have.

None of these proves bullshit on its own — but a pile of them signals text engineered to impress rather than inform.

Tip: The "X is the new smoking" snowclone — applied to sitting, sugar, loneliness, screen time, almost anything — is a textbook generic statement: vivid, emotionally loaded, and almost never backed by comparable evidence.