Last Wednesday, Professor Pluford’s Encounters class was met with disaster when student Taylor Brown spontaneously combusted in the middle of class after saying something really dumb, according to eyewitnesses.

“I remember it happened at 11:25 in the morning,” student Joan Du Bois stated. “We were all sitting there silently, and our professor was getting tired of rephrasing the same question over and over again. She asked again, but we just kept quiet. Then, Taylor started talking. They’ve never really said anything in class before, and they seemed really confident about what they were talking about. It was fine up until they used the word ‘dichotomy’ wrong. I think they thought it means similarity, because they used it in that way. No one said anything about it, and we moved on. After about a minute, a horrified look came over their face; I assume they remembered what dichotomy meant. Not even a minute later, and they burst into flames.”

“It was really macabre, which means disturbing, if you didn’t already know,” said Elijah Marx, who was elected class mansplainer. “I didn’t even notice the misused vocabulary word, as I kept waiting for the right time to interrupt them and go on a long-winded rant about something they failed to understand in their off the cuff remark. Taylor exploded before I got the chance to, and ash and smoke filled the classroom. It was like a volcano had erupted.”

Although the flames have been extinguished and the classroom cleaned, the event will live on in the memory of the witnesses, who, quite literally, died of humiliation. 

“It was just so strange,” Professor Audrey Pluford stated. “I have never seen another human being so confident in their vocabulary one minute fall into insecurity and embarrassment the next. It was very tragic, and I hope no one ever makes the same mistake as Brown has: using unfamiliar vocabulary to impress an Encounters class, of all things.”