Speaking of idioms - Do you walk to school or take your lunch?

Possibly, but because people are reacting to it now, it means it still has legs.

It's an interesting question. On the surface, the query is meaningless—if you just look at the words and don't understand what drives them. However, for me, this apparent non sequiter makes perfect sense. Some of us lived close enough to walk to school relatively quickly, and were able to go home for lunch, eat it, and walk back in time. Others lived too far away to walk to school, so came on the bus (or got a ride with their parents) and brought (or bought) their lunches and ate them at school.

Do you walk to school or take the bus would make better sense as a stand-alone question, but it leaves out the students who do neither. Some get dropped off by parents or drive their own cars—so if the situation behind that question is about where a student eats lunch, the bus/walk/drive thing would not totally answer it. Of course there are other ways to deal with the issue, such as, do you eat lunch at school, or do you go home for lunch? But even that isn't quite specific enough for some situations, because it leaves out the notion that some pupils MUST eat lunch at school because of where they live. Nor does it answer the question of whether you bring your own lunch or buy a school lunch. Or deal with kids who simply prefer to stay in school and eat lunch with their friends, rather than dash home, gulp the food and dash back.

The lesson for writers here is to pay attention to the difference between what your words say and what they actually mean. If you throw a line like that into a story, ONLY the people who went to those kinds of schools in that kind of an environment will understand what's happening here. Everybody else will be wondering if there's a typo or a page missing.

As my writing mentor (my first beta as well, an experienced writer of novels) said to me, "You won't be standing next to your reader explaining what you actually meant every time they get confused. What you meant has to be clear in the writing itself."

 

My answer would be "neither, I ride the gravy train and eat on the way"

But the real question is "why is a mouse when it spins?"