[Of unknown origin; cf. OF. boul, boule, bole fraud, deceit, trickery; mod.Icel. bull ‘nonsense’; also ME. bull BUL ‘falsehood,’ and BULL v.3, to befool, mock, cheat.
(No foundation appears for the guess that the word originated in ‘a contemptuous allusion to papal edicts,’ nor for the assertion of the ‘British Apollo’ (No. 22. 1708) that ‘it became a Proverb from the repeated Blunders of one Obadiah Bull, a Lawyer of London, who liv’d in the Reign of King Henry the Seventh.’)]
† 1. A ludicrous jest (cf. BULL v.3). Obs.
1630. J. Taylor (Water P.), J. Garret’s Ghost, Ded. Wit and Mirth … Made vp, and fashioned into Clinches, Bulls, Quirkes, Yerkes, Quips, and Ierkes.
1652. Urquhart, Jewel, Wks. (1834), 229. He had all the jeers, squibs, flouts, buls, quips. taunts, [etc.].
a. 1695. A. à Wood, in Oxoniana, II. 23. Every one in order was to … make a jest or bull, or speake some eloquent nonsense, to make the company laugh.
2. A self-contradictory proposition; in mod. use, an expression containing a manifest contradiction in terms or involving a ludicrous inconsistency unperceived by the speaker. Now often with epithet Irish; but the word had been long in use before it came to be associated with Irishmen.
1640. Brome, Antipodes, V. iv. 323. Dumbe Speaker! that’s a Bull. Thou wert the Bull Then, in the Play. Would I had seene thee rore. Bla. That’s a Bull too, as wise as you are, Bab.
1649. Selden, Laws Eng., II. xi. (1739), 63. It is no Bull, to speak of a common Peace, in the place of War.
1673. Milton, True Relig., 5. Whereas the Papist boasts himself to be a Roman Catholick, it is a meer contradiction, one of the Popes Bulls.
1702. Let. fr. Soldier to Ho. Commons, 17. These Gentlemen seem to me to have copied the Bull of their Countryman, who said his Mother was barren.
1711. Pope, Lett. to J. C., Wks. 1736, V. 174. I confess it what the English call a Bull, in the expression, tho’ the sense be manifest enough.
1802. Edgeworth (title), Essay on Irish Bulls.
1803. Syd. Smith, Wks. (1867), I. 69. A bull is an apparent congruity, and real incongruity of ideas, suddenly discovered.
