Are You Glazing Us, Grandma?

I’m not always sure what my grandkids are saying.

“Are you glazing us, Grandma?” one of them asked at the end of what I thought was a satisfying late- night talk.

Glazing them?

My grandma always glazed the Sunday dinner ham, not me.

My grandkids use words like cap—meaning unbelievable.  And big mad—a way to describe anger. And skibidi, which my grandson explains is a throw-around word that can mean anything. You can use it when you don’t know what else to say.

Skibidi— I’ll remember this the next time I can’t find just the right word.

There’s a whole list of these words: slay (not meaning kill), rizz (nothing to do with getting up in the morning), and flex (no connection to bending with the times). This emerging lingo tempts me to roll my eyes with others in my generation.

But I remember another set of words—groovy, far out, jive, dig it, turkey, bummer—talk that was cool (not meaning chilly) back in the days of peace signs and maxi dresses and bell-bottomed jeans, back when I promised myself not to roll my eyes when I was old.

And I recall telling my students that Shakespeare messed with the language. He changed nouns into verbs (Unhair thy head) and married two words into one (eyeball, madcap, green-eyed). And invented language he needed—skim milk and night owl and wild goose chase.

So there you have it—my grandchildren and Shakespeare—playing with words, helping the language evolve.

I looked up glazing. And that’s not what I was doing in that late evening talk. I wasn’t biased or overhyping. I meant every word I said from the bottom of a grandma’s heart.

But, like my grandma, I did glaze a ham for Sunday dinner.