From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Bogus \Bo"gus\, a. [Etymol. uncertain.]
Spurious; fictitious; sham; -- a cant term originally applied
to counterfeit coin, and hence denoting anything counterfeit.
[Colloq. U. S.]
[1913 Webster]
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Bogus \Bo"gus\, n.
A liquor made of rum and molasses. [Local, U. S.] --Bartlett.
[1913 Webster]
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
bogus
adj 1: fraudulent; having a misleading appearance [syn: {bogus},
{fake}, {phony}, {phoney}, {bastard}]
From The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003) [jargon]:
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.
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