“Betty, I won't make assumptions About why you switched your homeroom, but I think it's 'cause of me”
Uncle Jerry cites Cicero's Catilinarian orations as the classical exemplar of apophasis, the rhetorical move of saying the thing you claim you will not say. He pulls the example from his high-school Latin: 'In my very first maybe it was my second year of Latin in high school, I think we had to translate Cicero's Catilinian oration. So there's bad guy named Cataline and he has attempted to overthrow the state and Cicero, an attorney, is prosecuting him... And Cicero uses litotes all the time when he says, you know, I don't have to tell you what an evil man Cataline is.' He uses the Cicero example to frame James's opening rhetorical move ('I won't make assumptions about why you switched your homeroom, but I think it's 'cause of me') as a classical apophasis, pre-concluding a debatable point by claiming not to say it. The reference is to a rhetorical tradition rather than a direct Taylor allusion.