bull session
nounEtymology From bull(shit) + session.
1
Idiomatic An informal discursive group discussion, often one where politics, economics or current events are discussed.
- For instance, if you were having a bull session in somebody’s room, and somebody wanted to come in, nobody’d let them in if they were some dopey, pimply guy.1951 July 16, J[erome] D[avid] Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, →OCLC, page 217:
- "We had the usual bull sessions about solving the world's problems or what would be the result of something," recalls Breidbart.2002, Sam Williams, Free as in Freedom, →ISBN:
2 more examples
- There's an old joke that I used to hear occasionally on British television shows: "It's not theft—it's socialism!" I couldn't help but think of it repeatedly as I read this paper on self-organizing institutional arrangements among pirates, which bears some disturbing similarities to an hours-long anarcho-capitalist bull session.2008 February 15, Megan McArdle, “Piracy: a symphony of spontaneous order”, in The Atlantic, archived from the original on 05 Dec 2025:
- NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine ordered reviews of SpaceX and Boeing. Apparently this was planned before the whiskey-and-weed bull session on The Joe Rogan Experience.2018 November 30, Elizabeth Lopatto, “Why so many people think Elon Musk is a hero — or a villain”, in The Verge, archived from the original on 08 Nov 2020: