"...I think there are more Brits who understand "bullshit" than Americans who understand "ballocks," and this is probably true about all slang, owing to the fact that Brits see a lot more American-made TV and movies than vice versa.

Is "ballocks" losing ground to "bullshit" in Britain?..."

I would tend to agree with GUEST of 9/V/07 that, in this case "ballocks" is nonesence whilst "bullshit" is deliberate nonsense or an attempt to deceive, however I cannot agree with Jim Dixon (above) in his idea that 'bullshit' is an Americanism popularised by the media.
The British military have been using 'Bullshit' as a derogatory term for the preparation of uniforms and equipment for parades (often seen as pointless by the participants) for decades.
'Bullshit' was sometimes bowdlerised to "Bullshine" but more often abbrieviated to "Bull"
The attitude became applied also to the action and so one would "Bull" boots etc.

My late Father once mentioned a snatch of song from his days as a conscript (early WW2*) with the lines:

"How Green is my Blanco
"How square is my kit,
"That's how we win wars
"With all this bullshit..."


As to the spelling of ballocks/bollocks, I believe either is acceptible, although I favour the former, given its links to balls (testicles) and that there was a dagger hilt design in the medieval period known as the 'ballock dagger' (try looking at: http://www.myarmoury.com/review_ve_ballock.html )


With reference to Azizi's comments about 'bloody', I'm afraid my theory is that Americans simply have no real idea how to swear in English - this could be that, due to the multi-national nature of the origins of the population, they import terms from other languages to do duty for curses, so that they have little or no graduation of swearing in English.
In America, (from limited experience), swearing seems to go from darn to damned to F--k,
In British (and, I suspect other Commonwealth) English there are a number of graduations in between.

It's a little to late at night (2 am) to go into it at the moment.


Walrus


* A pweriod when "Bullshit" would never have been allowed within a mile of appearing on screen, stage or radio**
** There had been some controversery when Shaw had used "Not bloody likely" in 'Pygmalion'.