Why yorker

To be "yerked" or "yarked" is to be struck, smacked or hit; to have something thrown at you suddenly; or to have your shoes tied together. Many a batsman has suffered all these indignities as a yorker knocks them over, so I like the idea of the "yarker", even if I can't prove it is the true forefather. Either way, it's entirely correct to mutter, after being yorked, that you've also been yarked.

So what are we left with? Hypotheses still, but we can at least do a bit of clarifying. One website claims with certainty that the yorker gets its name from the device for tying your trouser legs below the knee. This doesn't take into account that the cricketing term appears in the 19th century, whereas the trousering one is not recorded until the 20th.

Given that it is quite difficult for an older word to derive from a newer one, barring some kind of quantum delivery, I think we can rule that theory out.

Emmett was certainly a very influential and successful left-arm quick bowler, and, according to Anthony Woodhouse, "perhaps cricket's greatest character". Emmett didn't make his Yorkshire debut till , though, some five years after the yorker was first recorded, so there's no way he was responsible for inventing the delivery.

He did invent his own slower ball, though, one that pitched on a right-hander's leg stump and then cut away towards off. Emmett called it the "sosteneuter", and it is surely due for a comeback. Perhaps Zaheer Khan might like to add it to his repertoire?

Whatever its origins, it's reassuring to those of us still trying and failing to master it, that Lasith Malinga "didn't have any idea of how to bowl a yorker" when he was called up to the Sri Lankan national team.

He's certainly nailed it now, and Waqar Younis says his performance against Kenya in the World Cup "reminded me of myself in the good old days". And, having apparently honed his skills by bowling at a pair of shoes in the nets, I can't help but wonder if Malinga is inadvertently giving us a glimpse back into history, and returning the yarker to its boots. Liam Herringshaw is a medium-paced palaeontologist who moved to Newfoundland from the UK to improve his chances of opening the bowling.

Matches Schedule Points Table Videos. In an attempt to keep this part of the conversation alive, I reached out to four academic experts—selected from both sides of the ongoing debate about the harm caused by these platforms—and asked them, with little preamble or instruction, the question missing from so much of the recent coverage of the Facebook revelations: Should teen-agers use social media?

I started with the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has emerged in recent years, in both academic and public circles, as one of the more prominent advocates for issues surrounding social media and teen-age mental health.

In his response to my blunt question, Haidt drew a nuanced distinction between communication technology and social media. I also talked to Adam Alter, a marketing professor at N.

He expressed worry, for example, about the difficulty of trying to move a teen-ager away from social media if most of their peers are using these platforms to organize their social lives. In answering my question, Steinberg underscored his frustration with claims that he thinks are out ahead of what the data support.

After all, people were certain that the world was flat. Another leading academic who expresses caution about stamping out social media is Amy Orben, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, who specializes in the statistical analysis of large data sets.

In , Orben, along with an experimental psychologist at Oxford named Andrew Przybylski, made waves with a contrarian study that they published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. The paper applied an advanced statistical technique called specification-curve analysis to three large-scale social data sets, which contained responses from more than three hundred and fifty thousand individuals.

Orben and Przybylski found, in contrast to previously published results, only a minor negative association between digital technology and adolescent well-being. These four expert responses do not provide a definitive answer to the question of whether teen-agers should participate on platforms like Instagram, but they do encode some useful insights.

The issue is that humans are complicated. Many factors influence well-being, and many of these factors are correlated in subtle ways—maybe the very reason you use social media more as a teen-ager is to feel better about other issues that are already making you sad.

Soon after Orben and Przybylski published their study in Nature Human Behaviour , for example, a group of researchers, including Haidt, published a reply in the same journal, arguing, among other things, that the minor negative correlation in the original paper increases significantly when you change the behavior studied from screen time in general to social media use more specifically. Orben and Przybylski then responded with a reply to the reply—and so turns the slow wheel of research progress.

In some ways, writing was the best treatment. By Ofole Mgbako. Black Lives Matter, police brutality, and the long history of racism in America. Ian Parker on a widespread fraud on organic farms , M. A rib belt? Kinesio tape? Do you wear a brace for it? By Michelle Rial. Start earning the minute you wash ashore. By Nate Odenkirk. By Andy Borowitz. The senator from Texas draws the ire of Big Bird and company. By Barry Blitt. Try martial arts to wrestle the phone away or time travel to confront the young Steve Jobs.

By Jay Ruttenberg. The consequences of those choices are where life is. By Yiyun Li. By Linda Gregerson. By Cressida Leyshon. By Clarence Major. The New Yorker Interview. News Desk. Amateur Hour. Culture Desk. Persons of Interest. A Reporter at Large.