bogus
     adj : fraudulent; having a misleading appearance [syn: {fake}, {phony},
            {phoney}, {bastard}]
Source: WordNet® 2.0

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.


Source: The Jargon File