I was out with my adult child today, and we passed by a new store selling clothing with sports team logos on it. Philadelphia has a fair number of teams (Phillies, Eagles, Flyers, 76ers, Union) and a lot of people willing to wear clothing imprinted with the logos of their teams. I had been inside the store, and so I told my kid the merchandise wasn’t particularly high quality, and that the store itself was uncomfortably jammed.

We glanced in. “Yes, that’s a lot of tat,” said my kid, meaning tasteless junk (as opposed to a certain form of lace and as opposed to shorthand for “tattoo.”) Then my kid commented on how archaic their vocabulary is. We are both like that, because we grew up reading, and are as likely to quote from Louisa May Alcott or Frances Hodgson Burnett as to know which catchphrases are current.

“That’s the mistake a lot of people make about the latest slang,” I said. “You don’t want to master it. The thing is to master the slang of all the past decades, and then bewilder the children with it.”

I was reminded about the time one of my eighth grade students decided it would be fun to troll his classmates by wearing a Trump hat (this was my last year of teaching middle school, which was 2016). I told him to take the hat off, and he asked why, ready for an entertaining bout of trolling. “Because gentlemen don’t wear hats indoors,” I said firmly, and he couldn’t argue properly with that (the students wore a uniform in my school, after all). He took it off.

It was essential, when teaching middle school, not to attempt to match their sense of humor or to stay up with the latest fashions in rude catchphrases. It was also important never to be sarcastic; the children loved it, but it hurt their feelings too, and it led them to being mean to each other. No, you had to specialize in being from some other world, a planet where you could be quixotic and a little boring, or even peculiar, but never cool. Dad jokes were acceptable, but only if you were utterly deadpan when making them and they couldn’t figure out whether you were being intentionally funny or intentionally uncool.

The thing is, I can’t remember the year when my students (all boys) all had little pigtails and collected pogs. Or the year they all decided it was funny to lisp, or maybe that was just in my school. When were mullets? How recent were fidget spinners? Tiny thumb-sized skateboards? The HampsterDance? I don’t remember. Some of my students who loved the HampsterDance are fathers now themselves.

There is never a time when it is too late to be unfashionable, is what I’m saying. That reminds me, I have been planning to reread Little Lord Fauntleroy for some time now.