We've got many friends down here in the New South, and somewhat by coincidence many of them have found themselves with child in the last couple of years. I say somewhat because if you've got a number of friends in their late 20s and early 30s, well, babies are apt to erupt.

By and large, most of us are not circumspect about our use of language. That is, we tend to use whatever words we damn well please. This is fine and good when you're hanging out with erudite adults and tossing down a few brews. It can be a problem with kids.

So far, most of us haven't worried too much about this, however, as our children have been too young to speak.

Not anymore.

My son Max is talking. He's 18 months old, and he's got a big vocabulary, one that grows by two or three words a day. And he also likes to mimic everything he hears. Yesterday I taught him how to say "Albuquerque," and he did quite well. But since he doesn't have any way to really tie Albuquerque into his brain, I don't expect him to whip that one out again any time soon. But he also learned Julie and brownie and pineapple, all things that he was able to see and understand (and in the last two cases, taste).

It's the mimicking part that has caused us to cut back a bit on the ol' cussing. Not completely, since that wouldn't do much good. Max's favorite music is punk (everything from the pop of the Godfathers and Ramones to real fine hardcore like Earth Crisis and old Voivod), which tends to have a bit of the language in it. And anyway, I figure if he learns words and how to use them at home, he's better off than learning them "in the street."

So anyway, now that Max is talking, he's quite sure that everything he says is crystal clear to Barbara and me. He's now babbling in paragraph-length increments, and I'm lucky if one or two words in that set make sense. One reason for this is that Max only knows two or three verbs, and so he's not really putting sentences together.

More often, though, Max and I talk about what he's experiencing at that moment. A normal conversation goes like this:

"Bud?"

"Do you see a bird, Max?"

"Bud!"

"Oh, you hear a bird. Where is the bird?"

"Dug."

"I don't see a duck, where is the duck?"

"Dug!"

"Oh, a dog. Yes, I hear the dog, too."

"Tuck."

"Yes, there's a truck right there..."

And on and on and on and on and on. When Max is puzzled by something he sees, he'll point and ask, "zat?", which is his version of "what's that?"

That sort of questioning is most common when we're away from home. Max knows most of the things he deals with at our house: radio, spider (he loves to dance as the big garden spiders sway in the wind on their webs), book, walker, car, floor, couch, chair and so on. Probably about half his words have to do with food and drink (he even can tell the difference between iced tea and beer by the glasses each is served in). This knowledge has led him to be a somewhat more picky eater. Now that he can speak, he thinks he can dictate his meals. Given the choice, he'd eat "biskit" and "mil" (biscuit and milk) morning, noon and night, a diet that would be healthier than Snickers and juice, but just barely.

A friend of ours observed Max and his nascent speaking abilities a couple of months ago and said, " he's exploding." Our friend was right, though unlike a regular explosion which dissipates quickly, this learning explosion lasts for a year or two and never fully abates until, well, death. I still learn new things every day, though not quite at the same speed or intensity as Max does.

This, of course, is the beginning of the supposed "terrible twos," that time when children have learned enough to begin fully processing their impressions of the world around them and thus tend to be overwhelmed by all the information they're trying to file into their brains. And since most of these kids have cut all of their teeth except their last set of molars (which generally don't arrive until sometime around the age of three), parents can't ascribe whininess and other annoying behaviors to the pain of teething. So experts give us another convenient excuse: the terrible twos.

Whatever. Max is fairly exuberant in his new, greater appreciation of the world, and even when he gets tired and frustrated a smile of wonder often breaks through his cloudy face. He knows there's a lot more to discover. And he figures he'll get to everything else in a day or so.

It's a good theory. I'm still practicing it.

Jon Worley is still trying to discern the difference between "dug" and "dug."