The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
September 21, 2008
Vol. 11 no. 37

Everything But...
           I love the always creative vocabulary of the sports world. Baseball, especially, creates all sorts of terms and expressions, some of which become imbedded in our everyday speech to describe matters having nothing to do with sport.
           Today, the phrase is “going yard.” Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense, because in a literary way it doesn’t. It means to hit a home run, to make the ball go out of the (ball) yard. One source said that it came out of Camden Yards in Baltimore, though in that case the Yards were originally railroad yards. I have a hunch it was coined by a sports broadcaster who wanted to say something new and unique. Then it caught on and other people starting going yard.
           OK, this was a long way around to our yards for the day, the vineyard of Jesus’ parable. Not too many of us “go yard” to a vineyard around here, though my mother and aunt in Grimsby, Ontario, were just down the road from the great Niagara region of vineyards. The owner of that Biblical vineyard kept telling everyone he met to go yard and work and he would get paid properly. What is proper is always the issue.
           Was Elton John paid properly last week in his Regina concert? Each labourer in the vineyard was paid a denarius or the normal wage for a day’s work. The first paid had worked only for an hour at the eleventh hour, and they were pleased for now their families could eat for another day. Those who worked a fuller day also received what they needed, but became jealous and enraged because they were considered equal to the one hour workers. Equality is not a universal virtue! It doesn’t make cents. God doesn’t make sense. Do you think we make proper sense?