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".
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Bohr bug /bohr buhg/ n.
[from quantum physics] A repeatable bug; one that manifests reliably under a possibly
unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym of heisenbug; see also mandelbug, schroedinbug.