Not long ago, Daniel Pinkwater opened his front door, in the Mid-Hudson Valley, to greet a person who had come to mow his lawn. “Pineapples don’t have sleeves!” the mower blurted out. This was the same week in which Roger Sterling dropped acid, on “Mad Men,” but a bit of sober context may be in order. Pinkwater is a children’s author, and a specialist in nonsense. He has written more than a hundred books, with titles such as “Pickle Creature” and “The Frankenbagel Monster.” A decade or so ago, he sold the rights to a passage from one of his books to an educational-testing company—a passage involving an eggplant that challenges a rabbit to a race, in a kind of trippy parody of Aesop’s “Tortoise and the Hare.” The rabbit wins this time—eggplants are vegetables, after all—and the spectators end up eating the eggplant. There was no pineapple in Pinkwater’s mock fable, and no mention of sleeves. (The stated moral of his story was “Never bet on an eggplant.”) Those amendments he learned about when some eighth graders started phoning and writing him recently to ask whether he had been high when he wrote “The Hare and the Pineapple,” as they called it, or, barring that, whether he could tell them why the animals in the forest had eaten said pineapple.

An edited version of Pinkwater’s passage, we now know, was included in a test of comprehension in this year’s New York State reading exam, and students were asked if the animals in the story had eaten the pineapple in the end because they were (a) hungry, (b) excited, (c) annoyed, or (d) amused—by the fact that they had duped themselves into considering the possibility that a foodstuff could outrun a mammal, let alone self-locomote at all.

“If a pineapple were funnier, I would have written a pineapple in the first place,” Pinkwater said, sounding (c) annoyed by his newfound notoriety. But the testmakers evidently felt that eggplant’s brand awareness was not strong enough among the middle-school demographic, and so they went with the thorny fruit. (Neither Pearson, the test’s publisher, nor the Department of Education has cared to explain the edits.) Gambling is taboo in schools, so they did away with Pinkwater’s moral, too. They introduced a new character, a moose, who speculated that the stationary pineapple must have a trick up its sleeve, and a wise—or wise-ass—owl, who delivered the new kicker: “Pineapples don’t have sleeves.” (Another sentence that Pinkwater didn’t write, with a subtle political message to appease the monolingual lobby: “In olden times, the animals of the forest could speak English just like you and me.”)

The problem with multiple-choice tests is that they invite overthinking. Couldn’t an animal be motivated both by hunger and by annoyance? You start to wonder: Is this a trick question, or a bluff? They wouldn’t make it unclear without a reason, would they? Then again, surely an eggplant, or a pineapple, for that matter, wouldn’t participate in a race unless it secretly knew how to run. Herein lay the genius, perhaps, of the reading exam and the Pinkwater passage. The answer key was embedded within the text. Don’t overthink. Humans are just like animals. Put your pencil down and eat the test.

Pinkwater was having none of this revisionism. “This was done by somebody who was barely literate,” he said of his pineapple adapter, and added that the book from which his eggplant tale was borrowed included some other examples that might better illustrate his view of fables. “There was one about a fish who thought he was drowning,” he said. “The moral is: Animals are stupid. There was another about a mole who said that he was a fox. The fox said, ‘Well, you sure are an ugly one.’ The moral is: Who cares?” He’d just published a new children’s book, “Mrs. Noodlekugel,” and had felt compelled to leave a review on Amazon warning that there were no pineapples in its pages.

“As much as we try, we can never truly create nonsense,” Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor specializing in folklore and children’s literature, said, disagreeing somewhat with Pinkwater’s nihilism. “Even Chomsky’s ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ has meaning. Colorless becomes gray. Green is about ecology. Suddenly you have poetry, in a way.” Tatar preferred Pinkwater’s original—“I love the eggplant that can’t move!”—but felt that the pineapple version, upon interaction with its youthful “community of readers,” had come to resemble a modern adaptation of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” She said, “It’s a wonderful case, with all these children pointing at the emperor”—the testing service. “That no adults seem to have noticed this is really interesting.”