bork
Part of speech: verb
noun
Morphological type: simple
Topics: government
politics
Etymology: A reference to the unsuccessful 1987 United States Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork (1927–2012); first appeared in print that same year.
Inflected forms:
form: borks
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: borking
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: borked
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: borked
pos: verb
tags: past
form: Bork
pos: verb
tags: alternative
form: borks
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: To defeat a person's appointment or election, judicial nomination, etc., through a concerted attack on the person's character, background, and philosophy.
pos: verb
tags: US
ambitransitive
derogatory
often
examples: In light of the current furor over trying to appoint a new Supreme Court justice, I would like to submit a new verb in the English language. Three forms would be "to bork," "borking," and "borked." This would describe the act of partisan political character assassination.
George [H. W.] Bush will almost certainly have an opportunity to nominate one or more justices. It would be a pity for all of us if they are subjected to the treatment accorded Robert Bork. Honest disagreement is one thing; "borking" is something else.
I feel strongly that he [Senator John Tower] is being borked. … The charges that have been leveled at him have all proved groundless, baseless.
In other words, I am intentionally borking the headline writer, for no other reason than to make my point with greater force.
After an eight-year hiatus, these groups are back on the scene, ready to implement an apparent vicious strategy of Borking any judicial nominee who happens to disagree with their view of how the world should be.
[Stephen L.] Carter believes that liberals seem to think that only conservatives "bork" and likewise conservatives seem to believe that only liberals "bork," but the unhappy truth is that everybody "borks".
Forcing their adversaries to bork nominees may, they may think, lead voters in the middle to think less well of liberals, enhancing the distaste for Washington politics that has helped conservatives gain political power.
Above all it discusses the best tactics to defeat a borking. Having been in the [Ronald] Reagan White House when Robert Bork was borked, I knew something about the subject, which was a huge help when the same borking guns were turned on my friend Judge [D. Brooks] Smith years later.
gloss: The bald notothen or bald rockcod (Pagothenia borchgrevinki), a species of cod icefish (Nototheniidae) native to the Southern Ocean.
pos: noun
tags: informal
examples: Near the water surface, Mayflower hunted for larger prey in the form of "borks." Pagothenia borchgrevinki "bork," for short—are buggy-eyed, dark-spotted fish with a Mohawk ridge of fins along the top. They live among the ice crystals formed by the platelet ice, hiding just below the frozen surface of the sea in -3°C (27°F) water.
On entering the Aquarium Building, I bumped into John Janssen, a biologist studying the behavior and physiology of Antarctic fish, and now a professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. John stood near a large circular seawater tank containing a school of "borks" (Pagothenia borchgrevinki), silvery, foot-long, trout-shaped Antarctic fish that feed on plankton. The majority of Antarctic fish live on the seafloor, but borks live in the water column, hiding from sea predators in the cracks and crevices of the sea ice.
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