Wyeth knew that his answer might well be dumfounding to a professional protagonist of formal learning, but he went ahead and said it: "I didn't go to college.
Zola remembered De Maupassant as "a proud he-man who told us dumfounding stories about women, amorous swaggerings that sent Flaubert into roars of laughter.
It was then that a supreme rupture of precedent occurred, electrifying and dumfounding every Briton present.