I had a weird flashback to a super specific thing today.

I don’t know if it’s enough to sustain an episode, but we’ll see.

Here we go.

Your Daily Lex.

I was always the writing guy in school, growing up.

For two reasons.

One, I was a good writer.

Two, I was really good at grammar and editing and that kind of stuff.

Part of that was from sixth grade.

I had Mr.

Miser in sixth grade.

He taught every subject except for math to me, and I loved his grammar lessons.

Mr.

Miser used a dots process, where when you answered questions correctly in his class, he would put a dot in his gradebook by your name, and there were competitions for the top dot getters each quarter, and my best friend at the time, Jeff Chang, he got more dots than I did in Q1, and I was like, that can never happen again, and indeed it never did.

I was always the first place dot getter after that.

One thing that would always trip Jeff up is he could not remember the term parenthetical.

Like, let me say, however, or although, or a parenthetical phrase.

That’s how Mr.

Miser would consider those.

Not just things that would go in parentheses.

Mr.

Miser strongly urged you never to start or end your sentence with however, but rather to declaim your however with commas mid-sentence.

That was his preference.

I was really good at grammar and the rules of grammar.

I can rattle off the nominative case pronouns and their corresponding objective case pronouns like nobody’s business, and so it fell on me to be the grammar editor for many of my friend’s essays, you know, once we hit 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grades, and I would do this quite willingly.

My father once mentioned, I think, that he used to charge people to do this.

I did it at no cost other than friendship.

Not that they lost a friend, but, you know, anyway, I would do it for friends.

I would not do it for randos, and sometimes you could edit stuff, and I could really just see I’m making this thing better.

Like, hey, you’ve got to fix this.

This is the wrong word, or move the section over here, whatever, you know, standard editing stuff, but sometimes, oh, sometimes, sometimes you’d encounter just a really bad essay, right?

Like somebody who really just wasn’t that good at it, and that’s okay, right?

Not everybody’s good at writing.

I’m not that good at math.

It’s okay.

That adds up.

I don’t know.

I don’t want it to divide us.

Anyway, these jokes are going to keep multiplying if I don’t stop, so let’s get to the root of the …

Okay, here we go.

I thought all of those jokes were exponents.

Did you hear how excited I got?

I couldn’t even speak.

I was so, so excited to make a really bad exponent joke.

Anyway, I …

Please excuse my dear aunt Sally.

Anyway, so I would edit these papers, but sometimes you’re editing a really bad one, and then it’s like, I would have this moment, and again, this is me as a 7th, or 8th, or 9th, or 10th grade, or whatever.

This is me as a kid, is my point, and I’d be struggling with, what do you do here?

I can help you fix some of this grammar, but this is still not a great essay, and what I eventually started doing was basically saying, hey, look, here’s the things that have to be fixed for grammatical purposes, but as written, this is probably a C essay, or as written, this is probably a B essay, or worse.

As written, this is not a great essay.

Saying that to friends is tricky.

Sometimes they knew, right?

Sometimes they were handing you a thing, and they knew it wasn’t that good.

They had dashed it off, or they just hadn’t put a lot of effort into it, or whatever, and sometimes it could be a little trickier, so it was always hard.

There was one year, I believe it was 9th grade, could have been 10th, where I had written an essay, and I got one point taken off.

I had a 49 out of 50 because the teacher said that my use of the word morph in the essay was slang, that morph was a slang term.

I do not believe she was right then.

Certainly she wouldn’t be right now, in part because she’s dead, but through no fault of her own, other than the heavy smoking, I guess, but anyway, so morph wasn’t slang then.

It is certainly a very, very commonly used regular term now.

It just was less common then, I think, not slangy, but I did spend much of the rest of the school year providing her with news clippings from the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal, or Newsweek Magazine, of the word morph being used in standard contexts.

I think I eventually got that point back.

It didn’t matter a lot.

Anyway, so yeah, I was the editor for so many kids’ essays.

I read so many essays, really, I don’t know.

I was just thinking about that today, how many essays I wrote and marked up for friends.

Anyway, that’s all I had on my mind, so now you know.

Happy Wednesday.

I don’t know.

I think Wednesday, by the way, is the best day for Christmas to fall on, which it obviously will not this year.

I feel like a midweek Christmas is the most restful kind.

That’s my take.

Now you know.

Happy Wednesday.

Lex!