JargonFile/entries/bogus.txt

bogus

adj. 1. Non-functional. Your patches are bogus. 2. Useless. OPCON is a bogus
program. 3. False. Your arguments are bogus. 4. Incorrect. That algorithm is
bogus. 5. Unbelievable. You claim to have solved the halting problem for
Turing Machines? That's totally bogus. 6. Silly. Stop writing those bogus
sagas. Astrology is bogus. So is a bolt that is obviously about to break. So
is someone who makes blatantly false claims to have solved a scientific
problem. (This word seems to have some, but not all, of the connotations of
random mostly the negative ones.) It is claimed that bogus was originally
used in the hackish sense at Princeton in the late 1960s. It was spread to
CMU and Yale by Michael Shamos, a migratory Princeton alumnus. A glossary of
bogus words was compiled at Yale when the word was first popularized there
about 1975-76. These coinages spread into hackerdom from CMU and MIT. Most
of them remained wordplay objects rather than actual vocabulary items or
live metaphors. Examples: amboguous (having multiple bogus interpretations);
bogotissimo (in a gloriously bogus manner); bogotophile (one who is
pathologically fascinated by the bogus); paleobogology (the study of
primeval bogosity). Some bogowords, however, obtained sufficient live
currency to be listed elsewhere in this lexicon; see bogometer , bogon ,
bogotify , and quantum bogodynamics and the related but unlisted Dr. Fred
Mbogo. By the early 1980s bogus was also current in something like hacker
usage sense in West Coast teen slang, and it had gone mainstream by 1985. A
correspondent from Cambridge reports, by contrast, that these uses of bogus
grate on British nerves; in Britain the word means, rather specifically,
counterfeit , as in a bogus 10-pound note. According to Merriam-Webster, the
word dates back to 1825 and originally referred to a counterfeiting machine.