I wandered back through campus toward home, contemplating very briefly Zorn’s lemma, stopping because it was not only boring, depending as it did on the trivial ring having the multiplicative unit one, but also incomprehensible. I didn’t understand a word of it, a symbol of it, a function of it, especially a function of it. What was the damn thing for? That thinking sent me spiraling the way I always did, wondering what I was doing with my finite, but unknown, number of days of life, realizing that I was a fraud, that I could talk to my colleagues for hours about things I simply didn’t understand, that I could fill a board with a proof that might make them ooh and aah, but had no meaning, no truth, no purpose. And the more wrong the noodling was, the more impressed they were. I was a charlatan. I knew nothing. But given that was my chosen topic, I was a successful fraud, a real, fake expert, an expert fake, a fake with real expertise, an ostensive definition of my subject, an object lesson for myself, a pure construction, and so, because irony is the air I breathe, a real-world example of Zorn’s lemma applied.