I heard it for the first time when I arrived in Ann Arbor to start college in 1975. I heard it only from my friends from the Detroit area, but they all said it. Never heard it since I left there in '83.
I’m from the SW burbs of Chicago - ditto. Oh - and it was when I was in high school - early 80’s.
East Coast 30-something here; never heard of it.
Boo-zhee I heard from black friends in college tho.
Note, however, that you were employing a truncated form of the verb Bog[art], not the adjective bogue.
I always thought it was the other way around. I grew up in Michigan, near Detroit (Livonia for those who know) and it was a daily part of elementary life (the 70s).
I didn’t hear bogus until years later and always thought it was what bogue had turned into.
This was a running joke during my college days. Every time someone would give you directions - “Then, turn right on Bogue”, it was practically mandatory that you had to say “Dude, that’s so bogue” in a deadpan Keanu Reeves voice.
My brother and I said it when we were kids in Monroe (SE Michigan) during the 80’s.
Huh, that was just us then? Who’da thunk it!
I only know it from Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, which has some scenes set among teenage girls outside Detroit circa 1970. I’ve never heard it otherwise. FWIW, I’m from New Jersey, and in my mid-twenties.
I’ve lived in the PNW for 35 years and not only have heard this word, but still have friends who use it now and then. But with a different meaning. Here, it means to flake out or be a no-show, like promising to show up for a Saturday morning foursome and getting too drunk the night before to make it.
Like answering the phone on Saturday morning to hear “Hey, Harry bogued on us, we need to find us another pigeon.”
We also used this as a verb (although I would have spelled it “boge”, still rhyming with vogue) meaning to run as fast as possible. As in “I was bogin’ down the sideline, when out of nowhere…” Someitime in the mid-70s.
This would be an interesting connection (if real, and not simply coincidental). There are quite a few transplanted Michiganders in the PNW. I wonder if they took “bogue” with them in the early 1980s, and it shifted meaning after they got there.
I’ll have to ask my (MSU graduate) sister, BIL, and brother if they are still using the word–and with what meaning, these days–in Seattle.
Never heard it as a verb. Perhaps this usage is a derivative of “boogy” – “I was boogyin’ down the sideline, when out of nowhere…”
I always related it to “bookin’”, meaning the same thing but equally nonsensical.
Book originally meant to check out of a place, such as a motel. (Book in, then book out.) It later came to mean “to depart,” took on the connotation of “depart quickly” and then transferred over to simply “move quickly.”
As to nonsensical–that describes most slang etymologies, to say nothing of most other etymologies.
Then there was Merwyn Bogue who was “Ishkabibble” in Kaye Kaiser’s band in the 1940’s.