You just don’t know what 17 year-olds are going to say. This is the one thing about parenting that I feel I can say with confidence.

Like today in the van for example, when my 17 year old was telling my 14 year about some suffixes. I believe they started by talking about the words ending in “some.” They were intrigued by awesome being used in place of “amazing,” when it really should mean causing awe.

“Do you know what a suffix is?” H asked.

E started to answer, but H interrupted to say, “I was asking mom.”

I answered, and then was quizzed on prefix and affix. And then he started telling me about infixes – an affix in the middle of a word.

“It’s too bad you can’t teach kids this,” he said, and I wondered why he was thinking that.

“Really there’s only one infix, and it’s f***. Like in ‘absof***inglutely.’”

“Ahhh,” I said, “Like Ms. McDonough’s Valentine.”

I didn’t need to remind him of when he was making Valentine’s for his whole class and all of his teachers and he got to Ms. McDonough. He was doing an acrostic poem for her and needed a u adjective. We looked up a list of “positive u adjectives” and unf***withable was on the list. Fortunately and unfortunately, this was the perfect, if unusable adjective for his amazing teacher, one of my best friends, now gone.

You see, when your son’s teacher is his mom’s friend, an amazing meet-once-in-your-your-lifetime woman who was truly unf***withable, even before she battled cancer… you do contemplate letting your sixth-grader write unf***withable on his Valentine’s affirmation. (Instead you just text her the word.)

And, if you’re judging me about my kids’ language — which surely some of you are, at a certain point after going through things… you decide it’s okay for your teenagers to use the words they want to use. And you hope that maybe one day they might describe you and themselves as unf***withable too.

“Well yea,” H said. “But that isn’t really in infix. It isn’t interrupting a word in the same way.”

The conversation shifted a bit. We talked about our dog’s upcoming birthday, when suddenly H looked up from his phone,

“Oh my God.” He said, startling me.

“What now?” I asked him, not expecting his next query, and laughing as soon as he asked it with a lot of passion:

“What is your opinion on split infinitives?”