On Tue, 9 Sep 2003 10:19:26 -0700 (PDT), Steve Vertigum utilitymuffinresearch2@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).