Hey everybody, welcome to another phrasal verb episode.
I hope you're all doing great and I hope that you're ready to learn a couple new phrasal verbs.
So, the two phrasal verbs that we're going to look at today are be cut out for and be in on.
I'm not going to do all of the be phrasal verbs, the ones where it's be, and then like a phrase after it.
I'll do some of them, but I feel like some of these be phrasal verbs feel more like adjectives.
They don't feel as much like phrasal verbs as just the other ones. ones that don't have be in them.
Because obviously, when there's a be, then the phrase after it is like describing the person or the subject.
So it feels more like an adjective phrase, but technically these are phrasal verbs.
So I'm going to include some of these, like we'll look at these two today.
We'll look at some in the next episode, but I won't go through all of the ones with be.
We'll look at the ones that I'm most interested in teaching you.
Okay, so first let's look at be cut out for.
So this phrasal verb is means to be suitable or have the necessary qualities for something.
For example, I could say, he's just not cut out for that job.
So here what I'm saying is that he just doesn't have the necessary qualities for that job.
He just doesn't have what it takes to do well in that job.
He's not suitable for it.
So that's be cut out for.
How about be in on?
Be in on means cut.
To be involved with or know about a particular plan or activity.
So, for example, I didn't know that she was in on the secret too.
Here, what I'm saying is that I didn't know that she knew the secret.
She was involved in the sense that she knew it and she was keeping that secret as well.
She was in on the secret.
All right.
Now let me talk about a couple different things, and as I'm talking, I'm going to use these two phrasal verbs over and over again in different sentences, and by the end you should feel a lot more comfortable with both of them.
Maybe you can start to identify them when you hear them and you can try to use them in your own sentences.
So first, let me tell you about my work history before doing what I currently do.
Specifically, let me talk about the fact that I have never been good at doing physical work, physical tasks that involve work my hands and a lot of coordination with my body.
I've always had kind of a lack of dexterity, as we might say.
I'm just not very good at using my hands.
I'm not very coordinated with my body in that sense.
And so I, like I said, was never good at working with my hands, but I always watched my dad fix things, build things, do all kinds of things around the house.
And I always admired him for that.
And I still really admire him for that.
And he always wanted to involve me in these different projects and teach me these different things.
But I was always terrible with my hands.
I was never cut out for that type of work.
And so I knew I could never really succeed In those types of jobs.
I knew that I wasn't cut out for physical labor jobs or jobs that involved a lot of building and constructing and fixing and things like that.
I've always been more analytical.
Let me give you an example of this.
I remember being in middle school, in 8th grade, And I had this class called Tech Lab, which was also kind of like a woodshop class, meaning we worked with building and creating things with wood and other materials.
Needless to say, it wasn't my best class.
I wasn't very strong in terms of making those things, as you can imagine.
However, there was one project that we worked on in groups where we had to construct this tower out of wood and we had to see how much weight it could support.
And so, of course, I knew that I wasn't cut out for building a tower very well, especially because we were competing with other people.
We wanted to win.
And so I knew I wasn't cut out for that.
So I said that I would be the one who would design the tower and build.
Then everyone else would do more of the building job.
And everyone was fine with that, since I was more analytical, let's say.
And so I designed this tower, and everyone else just kind of built it.
And what happened was that this tower that I designed was actually set the school record in terms of how much weight it could hold.
It was the greatest tower ever constructed in that class.
And so I might not have been cut out for a more physical role or for building.
I was cut out for the role of architect.
I did a good job analyzing and coming up with this type of structure that would hold a lot of weight.
I just wanted to give that example to show you how little I was cut out for manual work, but how I was cut out for more analytical work.
That being said, all of my first jobs that I had like the first um three, four jobs or something like that were all jobs that required using my hands.
Unfortunately, i worked at a deli.
That was one of my first jobs and i remember the owner of that deli Wanted to make me the manager because I knew her very well and she really trusted me and she liked me, but I wasn't good enough or fast enough at making sandwiches.
I was not cut out for that type of work.
I was always slower than the other sandwich makers and i tried my best.
I really did, but i honestly just lack dexterity, especially in the kitchen.
So i was not cut out for that type of job.
And so i struggled and the owner decided not to make me the manager because the manager still had to make sandwiches.
She was unimpressed by my work.
Let's say not because I wasn't trying.
I was trying really hard.
I just struggled with that.
I wasn't cut out for it.
The same thing happened when I worked for a clothing store.
It was a lot of work with my hands folding clothes.
We had to fold clothes very fast and stock it on the right shelf and do all that kind of stuff.
And I was not cut out for that job either.
I would have thrived in a more analytical role, but not as someone who just had to process and fold these clothes for hours.
I was slow.
My piles of clothes that I made were not...
Very nice.
They were kind of uneven.
And honestly, I tried my best.
I would be sweating throughout my shift because of how hard and fast I was trying to work.
But I just wasn't cut out for that type of job, right?
So I struggled, unfortunately.
And the same thing also happened when I worked for my university's dining hall, specifically when I had to kind of do a lot of the cleaning and help with cleaning Just a lot of different things around the dining hall.
I remember needing to refill the drink machines, and I just couldn't do things very well.
I messed up many times.
I wasn't very good with the dishes either when I needed to wash dishes.
I always failed. finished slower than I should have finished.
Again, not because I didn't put the effort in.
I worked super hard.
I just wasn't cut out for those types of jobs, unfortunately.
There were some other things that I did at that dining hall that I was better at.
But all of the tasks that required me using my hands a lot, I just wasn't cut out for those jobs.
So I know that sounds kind of silly to a lot of you.
But it's something that I have always struggled with.
I've always kind of been critical of myself because of this, because it seems so silly.
Like, why can't you just get better at this?
And I have tried and tried, but I have to accept that yeah, I can improve, but I think I will always have a natural disadvantage when it comes to these things.
But I have more of an advantage when it comes to analytical things.
So everything evens out, right?
All right, let me talk about something else now.
I'm going to talk about pranks and surprises.
So I think I've told a couple of these stories before in other episodes.
Let me talk about an April Fool's Day prank that my mom and I played on my dad and my sister when I was really young.
For some reason, my mom wanted to prank them.
When you prank someone, it means that you play a joke on them.
They don't realize that you're joking or whatever.
So she wanted to prank them and she wanted me to be in on it too.
And she was my mom, so I said, okay, I'll be in on it.
And so she wanted to make them think that she had gotten into an accident.
Now, in hindsight, that's a terrible prank.
I think that we put them through a few seconds of extreme anxiety.
We shouldn't have done that, probably.
Yeah.
But it was this prank that my mom wanted to play, and she wanted me to be in on it, so I was in on it.
And then we only kind of let them think that for...
10 seconds, 15 seconds maybe.
We didn't want to torture them too much, so we played that prank on them, and that was the only April Fool's Day prank that anyone in my family ever played on someone else.
We never really had that tradition.
So that was the one time my mom wanted to do it and wanted me in on it too.
And so that's the one April Fool's memory I have in my family.
Another story I wanted to tell about this prank that was played was this prank at my high school, before I went there.
A few years, maybe actually just one or two years before I went there, there was this senior prank.
So the seniors, the oldest students on campus, will often have this tradition of playing a prank on the rest of the school.
This is called, like the senior prank day, and this one year the prank was that they glued all of the classroom doors shut in the school.
A number of people were in on it.
Obviously it wasn't just one person in on it, there were multiple people in on it.
They glued all the doors shut And that morning everyone realized when they got to school that they couldn't get into the classrooms.
And so they couldn't have class that day.
And it was a big scandal.
This was like the worst prank played.
Also because they had to pay to get all of these doors open, because they couldn't open the doors and everything.
It took a while and, of course, they had to use resources in order to do that or hire people to do that.
And so the seniors that year were punished.
And a lot of people thought that it wasn't fair because not all the seniors were in on it.
Only a handful of them were in on it, or maybe more than a handful, but not all of the seniors were in on it.
And so why should all the seniors get punished that year?
But I remember that they were going to cancel the dance that they were going to have pretty soon after that because of that prank and that caused a big uproar.
An uproar is like when people have a very, let's say, extreme or violent or just emotional reaction to something and they're yelling and they're really mad.
That caused uproar, because they didn't know why they were all getting punished, since most of those seniors weren't even in on the prank.
So that was a whole crazy situation.
And one other thing I wanted to mention is that in my wife's family they always do these surprise things for people's birthdays.
I don't like it, to be honest.
But...
They always do these things, and all of them are always in on it when it's my birthday, when it's my wife's birthday, one of her sister's birthdays.
There's always like this surprise that they need to do and they want everyone in on it.
You have to participate.
And so this is something that I thought of when I was thinking of this phrasal verb.
I was thinking of how my wife's family always tries to do these little surprise things, either parties or just little acts of kindness or whatever.
It's nice, obviously, but I'm not the type of person that loves surprises and things like that.
So it's not my favorite thing, but sometimes I have to be in on it when it comes to surprising one of my in-laws or whatever.
So that's one other time when I can think of being in on like a surprise or a prank.
Right, all right, I'll stop there.
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Okay.
All right.
Thank you for listening to this phrasal verb episode, and I'll talk to you in the next one.
