I subbed in a fifth grade classroom on Friday—one that can be quite challenging. We had a rough time together in September. I didn’t think I’d come back, but I gave them one more chance and then they Rick Rolled me IRL and I told them that was a dank meme and I only tolerate fresh memes, and since then we’ve gotten along just fine.
Still, I always feel the need to be prepared when I sub in their classroom, so I asked Vincenzo for some cool words I could say to the kids.
He said I should find a time in the day when I can say “cracked.” I wasn’t sure how to use it so I asked for an example. He said, like, if I’m playing video games and I’m popping off and my k/d ratio is high, then I can say, ‘I’m cracked.’”
I told him it was unlikely I’d be playing video games with the kids, even though I have a sweet gaming computer (which is true, and the students are obsessed with it), but maybe we’d play chess and then I could yell out, “Yeah! I’m cracked at chess!”
“No,” Vincenzo said, “you can’t be cracked at chess. There are only certain things you can be cracked at.”
I said, “Well what if I’m an egg and I’ve just been smashed on the counter?”
“That one I’m not sure about…”
I said, “What if I’m a human and I smash a dozen eggs on my forehead and it’s not even dented?”
“Yes, then you’re cracked.”
“Yeah,” I said, remembering the time I smashed a dozen eggs on my forehead. “I was so cracked.”
“No, no, no,” Vincenzo said. “Cracked is present tense.”
My brain started to implode a bit. “So I can’t say, ‘I’m cracking it,’ or ‘When I was popping off on video games and my k/d ratio was high yesterday, I was cracked?’”
“No,” he said firmly.
“Wait, what exactly does ‘cracked’ mean?”
“Goated.”
My brain finished imploding. Without a brain, it was much easier to follow the next part of our conversation.
Vincenzo explained, “Like the word ‘cracked,’ you could never say ‘I’m goated’ or ‘I’m goating’ because it’s an acronym. It stands for Greatest of All Time. Tom Brady is the original goat.”
“Ohhhhh, so it’s GOAT, not goat.”
Vincenzo looked at me weird. He couldn’t hear the capitalization in my voice.
“Okay, this one makes sense,” I said. “So if I’m teaching a sentence diagramming and I explain the dangling preposition so well that the kids stand on their desks and cheer and some maybe even cry tears of joy, I could yell, I’m a GOAT!’”
Vincenzo shook his head. “No, let me make a correction. Tom Brady is not a GOAT, he’s the GOAT, so you can’t say, ‘I’m a GOAT,’ but you can say, ‘Tom Brady is the GOAT,’ and in all other cases, you say ‘I’m GOATed,’ but you can never say “I’m the goat.”
“Wait, so if I pop off in video games, I have to say, ‘Tom Brady is the GOAT!?”
Vincenzo face-palmed. “Maybe ‘GOAT isn’t the right word for you. Let’s try flex instead.”
I asked him a lot of questions about flexing, and here’s a summary of what I learned:
Flex is cool word to say. You can use it in any tense—past, present, future, subjunctive pluperfect etc. etc. For example, if there’s a challenging math problem you could say, “If you want to flex, you can try the challenge problem.”
If you plan to solve the problem in the future, you’d say, “I’m going to flex.”
While you’re solving the problem, you can say, “I’m flexing!”
After you’ve solved it, you can say, “I totally flexed that.”
And, of course, in the pluperfect tense* you could say, “I would have flexed that problem if Mrs. Beto hadn’t taken up all my math time talking about how cool she is.”
Flexed is…flexible. I get it.
You’re probably thinking now that MrsMouthy is cracked. She’s dropping knowledge bombs all over this blog and flexing so hard she’s totally goated.
And that, of course, is totally poggers.
WHAT’S COOKIN’ 2NITE:
Indian take-out!
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