A know-it-all doesn’t and doesn’t know that he doesn’t.

From Alfred’s journal

The man who feeds the ducks by the boat ramp spent an hour today telling a woman what every bird in the water was. He got the mergansers wrong, and the coot he called a duck, and the woman nodded the whole time because he was so sure. I used to think certainty came from knowing a lot, and that the loudest ones had simply read more than I had. Then I watched him point at a cormorant and name it a goose, and nothing in his face moved; a know-it-all doesn't and doesn't know that he doesn't, which is the tidy part of it, the part that keeps the whole arrangement standing. What I cannot settle is the woman. She may have known the mergansers all along and let him have them.