Word Detective versus Colin Powell
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said today it was "nonsense" to label U.S. intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as bogus. "The American people are quite assured" about the veracity of the intelligence reports, Powell said. "It's the media that invents words such as bogus."
Hmm…interesting; let’s check out that bit of spontaneous etymology with The Word Detective. (pssst…we’re pretending to be “Arthur Bogue” so he’ll suspect we’re just some goober)
All that glitters is not Gucci.
Dear Word Detective: Where did "bogus" originate? My name is Art Bogue and I didn't make it up. -- Arthur Bogue, via the internet.
No kidding. Are you sure about that? I've checked my reference books and they all seem to identify you as the source of "bogus" back in 1978. Something about an incident involving you selling a waffle iron autographed (or not, I guess) by Elvis Presley to your brother-in-law?
I'm joking, of course. "Bogus," meaning fraudulent or phony, was around long before your waffle iron adventure. When "bogus" first appeared in print way back around 1797, it was as underworld slang for counterfeit coins (counterfeit bills being known for some unknown reason as "coneys"). Somewhat later, by 1828, "bogus" was being used to mean the machine (known as a "bogus press") used to produce counterfeit coins. By about 1848, usage of "bogus" had expanded to include phony paper money as well, and in fact "bogus" had become a general adjective applied to anything, from phony gold bars to boyfriends, that turned out to be less valuable than it first appeared. Eventually, "bogus" was applied to anything of poor quality, even if it never pretended to be well made. The current use of "bogus" to mean "useless" probably owes some of its currency to the lingo of computer hackers, who have expanded the term to include a measurement of phoniness ("bogosity"), and even claim to have identified the elementary particle ("bogon") of bogusness.
The origin of "bogus" is, unfortunately, a mystery, although, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, "many guesses have been made, and 'bogus' derivations ... given" over the years. One theory traces "bogus" to "boko," which means "fake" in the West African Hausa language. Since "bogus" did first appear in America, this raises the possibility that its ancestor was brought here on a slave ship.
Another theory is that "bogus" may have arisen in criminal slang as a short form of "tantrabogus," evidently a 19th century slang term for an odd-looking or menacing object, leading some authorities to believe that "bogus" might be linked to "bogy" or "bogey" (as in "bogey man"), a very old name for the Devil.
7:48:06 PM 
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