Susan watches more foreign TV programming than I do. Not surprisingly, she often has closed captioning set ON in her streaming apps. When I watch programs in English, I find these captions distracting, of course.
Now and then, I have difficulty understanding movie dialog. It’s probably the result of my presbycusis combined with movie audio that combines dialog with loud music or mechanical sounds in the storyline (like shit blowing up). On those occasions, I ask Susan what she heard. Sometimes, she understands it, and other times she just tells me to turn on the captions.
This was the case with a particular piece of the dialog from the movie Top Gun: Maverick when Mav and Rooster are surveying airplanes in hangers along the edge of a recently bombed enemy runway. They spy an F-14 Tomcat that Rooster disparages, “We don’t even know if that bag of ass can fly.” I thought that maybe he said, “bad ass,” but I couldn’t be sure. So, I turned on the captioning, of course. It became clear that he definitely said, “bag of ass.”
As you likely know, the expression, term of art, refers to a word or phrase that has a particular meaning in a specific context. After some Google searches, I discovered that bag of ass is a Naval term of art for anything that is not strictly regulation – say, a disheveled serviceman’s uniform or a severely damaged or perhaps jury-rigged piece of equipment.
Or maybe this blog post. Context is everything.