"And so," he read, "after encountering the conundrum that was his enigmatic significant other, he ended up in a curiouser state than before." He paused and looked up to take a breath, and saw his teacher staring at him.

"Curiouser?" she demanded. "Pray, tell, which ignorant person did you hear that from? Or was it some ingenuity - or so you thought - on your part that prompted you to insult my intelligence?"

He stifled a giggle, but could not keep his voice from sounding out of the ordinary. "Lewis Carroll? Alice in Wonderland?"

Her stunned expression he would remember years after, even as she opened her mouth and closed it again and again in an attempt to recover her disgraced self in the eyes of her students. "Well," she warbled out, finally. "You cannot believe everything in those books, because that is for the sake of humour, and is not proper English."

That remark smacked him in the face as he retaliated, "Then what is proper English? How do you know what proper English is?"

"Do you want to be demoted back the first grade?" she exclaimed. "Elementary question, indeed! You gain a perfect use of English by - " and here she trailed off as she realized the trap she had placed herself in.

"By what?" came the insistent reply.

"Reading widely." The answer was so quiet that if one had breathed, one would have missed it. The atmosphere, however, was so intensely subdued as the whole class held their breaths in anticipation of the answer that would contradict and place her in a highly unflattering position.

He smiled slightly, but not too much, knowing that if he got cocky, he would end up like her. And that was a place he had no intention of being in.

"Furthermore," he continued relentlessly, "from where do you derive the workings and mechanics of the English Language? Are they not from books that tell you where the nouns, verbs and such go to? Why then do we not question them? Are you saying then that the majority is the truth? But that would be a fallacy in itself, wouldn't it?"

She looked clearly stupefied, and stayed silent for quite a lengthy period of time, as he shuffled his feet and looked down, unassumingly awaiting her answer. After what seemed like eons - and perhaps it was - her voice, devoid of strength, rang out, "Infinite regress is a highly undesirable - "

"So now you're arguing from an appeal to consequence?"

It was as though a wave rippled through the whole class, as they sat, stunned. The teacher trembled, and then suddenly, she saw the way out of the predicament. She raised a quavering hand at him, and said the words that would save her - for it was clear the bell would not.

"You," she whispered. "Principal's office. Now."

And he exited in truimph.