and thence throughout the Union, finally spreading itself over the English speaking world. A few, however, affect to regard it as a corruption of [hocus] pocus, and say that it refers to the German 'Hocus Pocus Imperatus, wer nicht sieht ist blind.'
The latest light upon the history of the word is thrown, as usual, by the indefatigable Dr. Murray, who, while slily satirising the 'bogus derivations circumstantially given,' makes another attempt to solve the riddle. He says: 'Dr. S. Willard, of Chicago, in a letter to the editor of this Dictionary, quotes from the Painesville (Ohio) Telegraph of July 6 and Nov. 2, 1827, the word bogus as a subs., applied to an apparatus for coining false money. Mr. Eber D. Howe, who was then editor of that paper, describes in his Autobiography (1878) the discovery of such a piece of mechanism in the hands of a gang of coiners at Painesville, in May, 1827; it was a mysterious looking object, and some one in the crowd styled it a bogus, a designation adopted in the succeeding numbers of the paper. Dr. Willard considers this to have been short for tantrabogus, a word familiar to him from his childhood, and which in his father's time was commonly applied in Vermont to any ill-looking object; he points out that tantarabobs is given in Halliwell as a Devonshire word for the devil.' [Bogus seems thus to be related to bogy, etc.]
1825. Hughes, in J. Ludlow's Hist. U. S., 338. This precious house of representatives—the bogus legislature as it was at once called.
1869. S.L. Clemens ('Mark Twain') Innocents at Home, ch. xvii. Nobody had ever received his bogus history as gospel before; its genuineness had always been called in question either by words or looks; but here was a man that not only swallowed it all down, but was grateful for the dose.
1874. M. Collins, Frances, ch. xxxv. 'They've got some good money, as well as bogus notes.'
1883. Saturday Review, March 31, p. 399, col. 2. M. Soleirol had probably a number of forged autographs of Molière; his whole collection was a bogus assortment of frauds.
Bogy, Bogey, subs. (common).—landlord.
An attributive
usage of the more familiar
meanings—(1) the devil; (2)
a person much dreaded. The
transition from sense 2 to that
which signifies a landlord is
easy. A French equivalent is
Monsieur Vautour; vautour = a
vulture; and the term is applied
to a hard-hearted landlord. In
passing, it may perhaps be mentioned
(having in view the
uncertainty which Murray confesses
hangs round the history
of this word in its primary
meanings) that ask Bogy, as a
reply to a question, occurs in
Grose [1785]. It is true it is
there associated with a vulgarism
which, however, on the
face of it, appears to have had
little to do with the expression,
except perhaps in the not over
clean mind of the burly bon-vivant
who compiled the dictionary
in question. It seems
to have been used much as
the modern 'God knows'!
or 'Bramah knows' under
similar circumstances. This,
at any rate, would carry it back,
in very much its present form,
much earlier than 1825, Murray's
earliest trace of it. Grose
