28 lines
4.4 KiB
HTML
28 lines
4.4 KiB
HTML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
|
||
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>bogus</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../B.html" title="B"/><link rel="previous" href="bogue-out.html" title="bogue out"/><link rel="next" href="Bohr-bug.html" title="Bohr bug"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">bogus</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="bogue-out.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">B</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="Bohr-bug.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="bogus"/><dt xmlns="" id="bogus"><b>bogus</b>: <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="grammar">adj.</span></dt></dt><dd><p> 1. Non-functional. “<span class="quote">Your patches are bogus.</span>”</p></dd><dd><p> 2. Useless. “<span class="quote">OPCON is a bogus program.</span>” </p></dd><dd><p> 3. False. “<span class="quote">Your arguments are bogus.</span>” </p></dd><dd><p> 4. Incorrect. “<span class="quote">That algorithm is bogus.</span>”</p></dd><dd><p> 5. Unbelievable. “<span class="quote">You claim to have solved the halting
|
||
problem for Turing Machines? That's totally bogus.</span>” </p></dd><dd><p> 6. Silly. “<span class="quote">Stop writing those bogus sagas.</span>”</p></dd><dd><p>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 <a href="../R/random.html"><i class="glossterm">random</i></a> — mostly the negative ones.)</p><p>It is claimed that <span class="firstterm">bogus</span> 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: <span class="firstterm">amboguous</span> (having multiple bogus
|
||
interpretations); <span class="firstterm">bogotissimo</span> (in a
|
||
gloriously bogus manner); <span class="firstterm">bogotophile</span>
|
||
(one who is pathologically fascinated by the bogus); <span class="firstterm">paleobogology</span> (the study of primeval
|
||
bogosity).</p><p>Some bogowords, however, obtained sufficient live currency to be
|
||
listed elsewhere in this lexicon; see <a href="bogometer.html"><i class="glossterm">bogometer</i></a>,
|
||
<a href="bogon.html"><i class="glossterm">bogon</i></a>, <a href="bogotify.html"><i class="glossterm">bogotify</i></a>, and
|
||
<a href="../Q/quantum-bogodynamics.html"><i class="glossterm">quantum bogodynamics</i></a> and the related but unlisted
|
||
<a href="../D/Dr--Fred-Mbogo.html"><i class="glossterm">Dr. Fred Mbogo</i></a>.</p><p>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 <span class="firstterm">bogus</span> grate on
|
||
British nerves; in Britain the word means, rather specifically,
|
||
‘counterfeit’, as in “<span class="quote">a bogus 10-pound note</span>”.
|
||
According to Merriam-Webster, the word dates back to 1825 and originally
|
||
referred to a counterfeiting machine.</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="bogue-out.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../B.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="Bohr-bug.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">bogue out </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> Bohr bug</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
|