Michael Wex's Jewish Week
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He’s lying around like he’s in his father’s vineyard
when his cell phone begins to ring. Typically for someone
(who doesn’t dip a finger into cold water [thoughtfully provided in a bowl beside his couch in the vineyard],
he looks at the ringing apparatus, cups both hands around his lips and yells, “Ma! Der cell phone klingt, my cell phone’s ringing!” His mother, who’s somewhere in the basement doing battle with her darling’s soiled linens, finally loses it and yells back up:
Nu,/i>, are you too sick to push the button, you plague of psoriasis?
The medical motif is particularly strong in such a sentence. In such contexts, krenkst means “Are you suffering from some serious but unspecified disease that renders it impossible for you to perform the action that I’m about to name [and is usually something difficult like answering the phone, opening the door or doing the dishes]?” The questioner already knows that the answer is no; the fact that the verb krenken (“to be ill”) is being used tells everybody that the person to whom you’re speaking is in perfect physical health.
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