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