Last night, shortly before thinking of the question below, I misremembered part of "On Bullshit", thinking that in the following bit, "try out" was "try on":
What tends to go on in a bull session is that the participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to hear themselves saying such things and in order to discover how others respond, without it being assumed that they are committed to what they say.
Alas! Had it been "try on", I could have responded: there's trying on, and then there's trying on; at least one species of bullshitting involves sighting a minor article of clothing—a frayed sock, say—and stitching together (out, naturally, of whole cloth) an entire outfit with concern only to match the patterns and colors already present in the original spur, putting on the result, and going out wearing it as if it were not just the most natural thing in the world to wear, but among the most fashionable.
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