Now That You Mention It, Yes

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the shell about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Yael messaged us from Israel with a great slang term, and it translates as a kit bag question.

Now, in Israel, a kit bag is a soldier’s duffel bag, and it contains lots of supplies.

So imagine a troop in basic training, and they’ve just been told to run laps or do some other kind of challenging drill.

And one of the soldiers asks, are we supposed to be carrying our kit bags while doing that?

And the officer, of course, replies, you know what?

Yeah, yeah, carry your kit bags.

So a kit bag question is the kind of question that carries a consequence you might otherwise have avoided.

Oh, yes.

And you all know those kind of people.

And they get consequences when the officer is not around later from their peers.

Maybe they get their dessert yanked from them in the mess hall or something worse.

Yeah, well, yeah, Al says that this has been carried over from the military into everyday situations.

So it’s sort of like, you know, class is about to dismiss and the kid pipes up.

Do we have homework today?

Oh, yeah.

Weren’t you going to give us a quiz?

Oh, that’s the worst kit bag question.

And I think that makes a lot of sense that it would migrate from the military to everyday culture because military service is mandatory in Israel.

Right, right.

Yeah.

So Kitbeg question is the English translation of the original Hebrew.

Right.

She’elot Kitbeg.

Yael contacted us via WhatsApp from Israel, and you can reach us via WhatsApp, too.

You can find that number on our contact page at waywordradio.org.

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