Dot handed me a small white tablet of Beechnut chewing gum as we sat on the top deck of the bus on our way home from work one Friday evening. She had also offered me one of her Woodbines.

It was evident he took me for a perfectly shameless prevaricator.

abortive vellum

I suspect that in their hearts most working mathematicians are Platonists, in that they take it as a matter of unassailable if unprovable fact that mathematical reality stands apart from the world, and is at least as real as the world, and possibly gives shape to the world, as Plato suggested.