Thing To Do Today: a yorker.

You know the game of cricket? 

Well, probably not, but the game has a rich and glorious vocabulary. (No, don't worry, the game isn't nearly as confusing as its r & g vocabulary suggests.)

At a basic level, cricket consists of someone chucking a ball at a man with a bat, and the idea is that batsman hits the ball as far away as possible and then sprints from one marked place on the field to another before the other team can retrieve the ball. Each journey from one mark to the other is called a run. If you get from one mark to the other and then back again before the ball is retrieved, for example, then that counts as two runs. You're supposed to keep on going until the other team get the ball back. If you manage to hit the ball to the edge of the playing field without it touching the ground you automatically get six runs. If the ball gets to the edge of the playing field but bounces before it gets there, or rolls part of the way, then you get four.

The man who chucks the ball is called a bowler. His job is to make the ball hard to hit.

A yorker is a ball designed to bounce under the bat, or just behind it, as shown by the green line here:


image by Trengarasu https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3837999

A yorker is extremely tricky to hit because there are three upright sticks on the ground just behind the batsman that he's not allowed to knock over (so he can't step back very far) and it's just as tricky to bowl. 

Few visitors to The Word Den will be planning on playing cricket today, but a very difficult to answer question is sometimes called a yorker (usually, I must admit, by old men). But, hey, asking difficult questions is a healthy thing, and, anyway, I don't see why the old men should have all the fun, do you?

Thing To Do Today: a yorker. This is probably called after the cricket-obsessed English county of Yorkshire, though in the 1800s to pull Yorkshire meant to deceive someone, and there's also a Middle English word yuerke, also meaning to trick or deceive, which may have something to do with it.

Here's my yorker: have you ever stolen anything?