So Abiola invite Fela to his house for a big party, and Fela have to go as they are family—even though Fela had yabbied Abiola in his song ITT [International Thief Thief]. And it's true, Abiola duped the country for that money—everybody knows it.

All the fairy tales of my childhood were conjured up before my startled imagination, and appeared to be realised in the forms which surrounded me; I saw the whole forest filled with trolls, elves, and sporting dwarfs.

The verb first appeared in print in 1988, enclosed in quotation marks, as in the Chicago Tribune of November 20, 1988: “Honest disagreement is one thing; ‘borking’ is something else.” In February 1989, Republican Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming commented on CBS This Morning: “I feel strongly that he [Senator John Tower] is being borked. … The charges that have been leveled at him have all proved groundless, baseless.”

My presumption is that this same mechanism was at work in two counties in Shaanxi Province, as recorded in county gazetteers. In Qianyang County, during the Cleansing of Class Ranks campaign of 1968-69 that put to an end the Cultural Revolution fighting, 152 households were newly labeled as landlord and 130 as rich peasant, while in Shanyang County over a thousand households were re-labeled as landlords or rich peasants.