WhatIs

/bohg owt/

vi. To become bogus, suddenly and unexpectedly.

"His talk was relatively sane until somebody asked him a trick question; then he bogued out and did nothing but flame afterwards."

See also bogosity, bogus.

/boh-go't*-fi:/

vt. To make or become bogus. A program that has been changed so many times as to become completely disorganized has become bogotified. If you tighten a nut too hard and strip the threads on the bolt, the bolt has become bogotified and you had better not use it any more. This coinage led to the notional 'autobogotiphobia' defined as 'the fear of becoming bogotified'; but is not clear that the latter has ever been 'live' jargon rather than a self-conscious joke in jargon about jargon.

/boh-go's*-tee/

n. 1. The degree to which something is bogus. At CMU, bogosity is measured with a bogometer; in a seminar, when a speaker says something bogus, a listener might raise his hand and say "My bogometer just triggered". More extremely, "You just pinned my bogometer" means you just said or did something so outrageously bogus that it is off the scale, pinning the bogometer needle at the highest possible reading (one might also say "You just redlined my bogometer").

/boh'gon fluhks/

n. A measure of a supposed field of bogosity emitted by a speaker, measured by a bogometer; as a speaker starts to wander into increasing bogosity a listener might say "Warning, warning, bogon flux is rising".

See quantum bogodynamics.

/boh'gon fil'tr/

n. Any device, software or hardware, that limits or suppresses the flow and/or emission of bogons.

"Engineering hacked a bogon filter between the Cray and the VAXen, and now we're getting fewer dropped packets."

See also bogosity, bogus.

/boh'gon/

[by analogy with proton/electron/neutron, but doubtlessly reinforced after 1980 by the similarity to Douglas Adams's 'Vogons'; see the Bibliography] n.

1. The elementary particle of bogosity (see quantum bogodynamics). For instance, "the Ethernet is emitting bogons again" means that it is broken or acting in an erratic or bogus fashion.

2. A query packet sent from a TCP/IP domain resolver to a root server, having the reply bit set instead of the query bit.

/boh-gom'-*t-er/

n. See bogosity.

Compare the 'wankometer' described in the wank entry; see also bogus.

/boh'goh-sort'/

n. (var. 'stupid-sort') The archetypical perversely awful algorithm (as opposed to bubble sort, which is merely the generic *bad* algorithm). Bogo-sort is equivalent to repeatedly throwing a deck of cards in the air, picking them up at random, and then testing whether they are in order. It serves as a sort of canonical example of awfulness. Looking at a program and seeing a dumb algorithm, one might say "Oh, I see, this program uses bogo-sort."

/bōt aŋ-kər/

n. 

1. Like doorstop but more severe; implies that the offending hardware is irreversibly dead or useless.

   "That was a working motherboard once. One lightning strike later, instant boat anchor!"

2. A person who just takes up space.

/bȯrd/

n. 1. In-context synonym for bboard; sometimes used even for USENET newsgroups.

2. An electronic circuit board (compare card).