bogus
    adj 1: fraudulent; having a misleading appearance [syn: bogus,
           fake, phony, phoney, bastard]

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]

Bogus \Bo"gus\, n.
   A liquor made of rum and molasses. [Local, U. S.] --Bartlett.
   [1913 Webster]

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.