Thus writes my student Ella, in a brilliant little essay on inventions. She's perhaps the most linguistically talented of my students – not necessarily the most academically inclined, but she has what we sometimes call an "ear" for language – she is an excellent mimic of sounds, and has a great aural memory. We'd learned the phrase "necessity is the mother of invention" in class, and she adopted it and made it her own aphorism very cleverly, and with a native-speaker's grace. I was impressed – such linguistic insightfulness and creativity is pretty rare.