Just realised bork is not spelled bork

[merryhouse]

Meandering mind suddenly put two threads together.

The word "balk", frequently encountered in my reading, which indicates a feeling of revulsion is not pronounced like a slightly-mangled "bulk" but actually rhymes with walk and talk.

The word "bork" which I have heard in various places is not, as I had assumed, dialectal and is not actually spelled that way.

I've been reading for 48 years

Eg. That car's borked.

@WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll

Isn't it a regional variant of boak? Maybe with the slight nuance of boak meaning something horrible is making you sick whereas bork (sometimes spelled boilk) is when something did taste nice, but you've just eaten too much of it?

No. It's a word in it's own right.

Balk, to stop, as at an obstacle, and refuse to proceed or to do something specified (usually followed by at): He balked at making the speech.

Was reading a post on MN the other day & someone used the expression "Common old garden" 😂

And this is Bjork 😂

(Just in case)

To balk is to pull away from something or to hesitate instead of going ahead. It's a term often seen in baseball - a balk is a foul on the part of the pitcher if he starts into the pitch and then stops.

To bork is a verb that entered American English after the failed Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Robert Bork back in the 1980s. He was cut to shreds by the Senate Judiciary Committee. If you cut someone to shreds to the point of destruction, you bork them.

Balk/baulk, walk and talk all rhyme.

No they dont, unless you're pronouncing the L in walk and talk.

In my work (IT) we use bork when something's fallen over. Then we bounce (restart) it.

'Oh no SharePoint's borked again'. 'Bounce the VM' (virtual machine).
'Oh no the VM hasn't come back up.'
'Call the army.'

We're really fun honest.

Balk is ball-k
Walk and talk are wok/tock

They don't rhyme

Ball-k is balk
Wall-k is talk
Tall-k is talk
They do rhyme

Bork however is something the Swedish Chef says

You dont sound the L in walk or talk

I’ve heard boak or baulk never bork

Bork is from the Muppets Swedish Chef and associated memes.

Walk and talk are wok/tock

No, they’re very much not.

They are for me

@BunnyMacDougal

I find that English people often insert random Rs in to words.

No idea why.

Because we don’t pronounce them. So bork is the same as bohk.

Easiest with ar, same as ah but clearer to explain.

So you might say ‘Americans say parsta instead of pasta (we mean pah sta but it’s pronounced the same as parsta in many parts of England). We aren’t adding an r.

Whaaat?

Balk does not rhyme with walk and talk. In my RP-ish English, anyway.

Balk = ball-k = bawl-k
Walk = Waw-k (= war-k for me)
Talk = Taw-k

Balk =/= bawk or bork

Bork is indeed a regional variation of boak where I’m from. I’m over 40 and the noise made pre-puking has always been a bork. Never heard of it in terms of something being broken.

I was well into my twenties when I idley wondered why I had never heard the word Cha-ohs (to rhyme with patio) out loud but it was used so often in books?

Anyway, yeah, it was the word chaos.

But you don't SAY 'bork'! You say 'baulk'.

I think a baulk is a substantial piece of timber

And a horse can balk at a jump (refuse to go over it)
(Or an ant, or a pebble, or a crisp packet.)

Both have a vocalised "L" sound

(Southern England)

I was well into my twenties when I idley wondered why I had never heard the word Cha-ohs (to rhyme with patio) out loud but it was used so often in books?

Sorry but I can't even begin to imagine how chaos could rhyme with patio. Chatio??!

I understood that bork was a typo for broke and was internet slang, like pwned.

I find that English people often insert random Rs in to words.No idea why

No English people insert random Rs into words. They just represent things phonetically in a different way in writing because they speak with a non-rhotic accent instead of a rhotic one.

So if you ask the average English person to write a phonetic rendering if the word 'bath', they might write it as 'barth'. But that's because to most English speakers from England, 'AR' represents the sound 'AH', i.e. a long Aaah sound, rather than a short A sound (as in 'cat'). We don't actually make a rrr sound. So we don't say barrrrth, we say baahhhth. But we write it phonerically as 'barth' because 'ah' and 'ar' sound totally identical in our accents.

I've explained this eleventy billion times on MN. It's almost as though no rhotic speakers (i.e. mostly Scottish/Irish/Americans) have ever heard an English person speak, or vice versa.