I've been wanting to write a meditation on encodings or Path::Tiny, but I always seemed to come up with a substantive perl question, which is more the purview of Seekers of Perl Wisdom. A confluence of events makes me interested in the word "bork." I had believed it to be an american english word, a verb that had been called into being in the 80's, and surprised to read marto describe File::Slurp as "borked." I think he took it at as a synonym for "kaputt," "busted," "broken," "f*****." I thought, gosh, that's a different meaning than the one I use it for.

Imagine my surprise as I'm surveying the cpan material for Lingua, and I see Lingua::Bork 'bork'. At first I thought it was a joke, then a con, but then I realized it was a function that rendered text in the idiom of the swedish chef from the muppets show. The assignment is explained in this pdf.

What makes this timely is the etymology of the american verb. Wiki included the meaning I remember, when some feminist said of Clarence Thomas, "we're going to bork him." This declaration was widely broadcasted and galvanized conservatives. This verbing supplanted an earlier passive verb "borking," where Bork would substitute his opinion for precedent.

What brings this all into focus is that Robert Bork was voted down by the US senate, replaced by Anthony Kennedy, who retired recently, and now we have all the same forces arrayed against each other again. It will be the best of times, the worst of times, and the end of life as we know it, if you can stand to watch tv. Mormon Methusalah Orrin Hatch will say the same things. If Kavanaugh isn't confirmed, we'll get someone else who thinks that speech is money, corporations are people, and that women cannot be trusted to make decisions about their bodies.

One thing I like to do when the parade of Not Normal is blaring at high volume is perl. I won't worry about the russia probe because I've got other russian stuff to do. I can't change institutions or states, but I can change the scripts I work with. I can make them more useful, gain a competitive edge. Many times I run an example of someone else's code, leave it sitting for a while, then come back to it when need for it arises.

Other times, perl is for distraction, education or entertainment, and it is in this vein that I introduce 1.bork.pl:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use 5.011;
use utf8;
binmode STDOUT, ":encoding(UTF-8)";
use Lingua::StopWords qw( getStopWords );
my $stopwords = getStopWords('en');

use Lingua::Bork 'bork';
say bork("This is the conjunction junction.");
my $sentence = "Many think this judge's nomination will lead to a rest
+riction on abortion.";
my @words = split / /, $sentence;
my $stop = join ' ', grep { !$stopwords->{$_} } @words;
say $stop;
say bork($stop);
__END__

[download]

This shows how Lingua::Stopwords works as well as Lingua::Bork:

$ ./1.bork.pl 
Thees ees zee cunjooncshun jooncshun.  Bork Bork Bork!
Many think judge's nomination will lead restriction abortion.
Muny theenk joodgea's numeenashun veell lead restreecshun aburshun.  B
+ork Bork Bork!
$

[download]

Maybe it helps to not take matters so seriously....

In reply to a look at [Lingua::Bork] by Aldebaran

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