The stringSingleton() method of the Module object appears to be indistinguishable from a first-class function value. But the appearances are deceptive. The method isn’t free-standing: we could have used this in its body and it would have referred to the Module singleton object, even after the import. And it’s not the method which is passed to map — instead a transient function value is implicitly created to invoke the stringSingleton() method (this is a process known as eta-expansion) and it’s that function-value which is passed to map.