On Tue, 9 Sep 2003 10:19:26 -0700 (PDT), Steve Vertigum
<utilitymuffinresearch2(a)yahoo.com> gave utterance to the following:
I believer this is the first time I have ever seen a
use of the term "borked" in a discussion before.
Newbies should be clued in that the term comes from
the nomination hearing of a Judge Bork to the Supreme
court (or a federal bench) -- where Democrates blocked
the Regan nominee. Hence the term, referring to a
blockage or an act of blockage.
If I ever bothered with wiktionary, Id add a "borking"
entry :-)
Actually, borked and borken have been common usage among regular Opera
users for the past year.
Back then, MSN rewrote their site so that Opera was sent a stylesheet
which mis-rendered in Opera, truncating paragraphs on the left to make
them unreadable. MSN's claim that this was simply a fallback stylesheet
was easily disproven - the stylesheet served to Opera differed from that
sent to "fallback" browsers in key places which resulted in the stated
rendering, thus this was considered by the IT press to be deliberate
targeting.
Opera's response (within a week) was to issue "Opera 6.02 Bork" - a
modified version of the browser which utilised Opera's superior CSS
support to "translate" any MSN page into "Bork" - the pseudo language
used
by the Swedish Chef character on the Muppets. Microsoft had very public
egg on their face, changed MSN back imemdiately and claimed that it was an
unauthorised prank by two developers. Press opinion said "Yeah right!"
(This was the second MSN "attack" targeting Opera)
Incidentally, Google offers Bork as an option in their interface languages
(they do Klingon, too).
--
Richard Grevers
Between two evils always pick the one you haven't tried