“Time to get kip” means “time to get some sleep.” Kip goes all the way back to an old Dutch word that means “brothel.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Kip Means Sleep”
Hi, who’s calling?
This is Mark, a wrap of staff that’s calling from La Mesa, California.
Well, welcome, Mark. What’s up?
Well, I had a question about a word that my uncle, who was a colonel in the Air Force, used to use when I was younger. He would say, it’s time to get KIP, K-I-P. And I just assumed from his mannerisms and the way he was saying it, it was time to get a nap, sleep. But I had never heard that word before or since. So I was wondering where the origin is and if that’s what it means.
Get KIPP. Yeah. And what armed service was he in? He was a colonel in the Air Force. Was he American? Yes. Interesting. Was he stationed overseas, perhaps in the UK? He did serve during the Korean War. Interesting. I ask because KIPP is really kind of almost exclusively a British term. Most Americans only know it from their reading and don’t actually tend to use it at all. But it has meant to sleep or to take a nap there for quite some time, but originally, a kip was a brothel. And it comes from a Dutch word meaning a house or hut, a small house or kind of a shack. By the mid-1800s, it settles out, and a kip is either a boarding house or a place where you can just kind of rent a bed for a while, or it means a nap or a short sleep. It usually doesn’t necessarily mean a full night’s sleep, although, again, like a lot of kind of less standard words, it varies depending on the source and place.
Interesting. Very good. Thank you for all the knowledge.
Yeah, our pleasure.
So do you use the word kip? I do not. I’ve heard it one other time used, actually, in an episode. I was watching television. It was an episode of Mask, the television show from the 70s and 80s. Sure. And the commanding officer had used it. It was the only other time, and my ears perked up because I thought, oh, I’ve heard that word before, but never since. So it can be both a noun and a verb, right? Let’s get some kip or let’s kip. That’s right. I was kipping. Right. You can kip. I kipped really well last night. Got some kip. Right. Well, maybe we’ll start interjecting it back into our vocabulary here in Southern California. I think that’s a good idea, Mark. Thank you so much for calling. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Have a good day. You too. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
Kip. Yeah. So originally brothel. But brothel also had different connotations. It just wasn’t a place where you found the pleasure of a lady. It was also sometimes a place where you had a room for the night, right? Yeah. And the pleasure of the lady was a secondary benefit. Caught up on sleep that you don’t get. Yeah, in the barracks. Yeah, exactly.
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