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Riddles are questions that require clever thinking to answer. They often use techniques like double meanings, puns, false concepts, and clues to create a twist. Riddles can be found in popular culture, such as in songs, games, and even comics.
A riddle, sometimes called a “teaser,” is usually a question that requires clever or unexpected thinking to answer. In general conversation, typically someone presents a question to another person who takes up the challenge to guess the correct answer. The diviner may obtain one or more guesses and sometimes the asker provides clues, but this is not required. Riddles usually have only one correct answer, and it is commonly given at the end, even if the guesser does not think about it.
Riddles with double meaning
The structure of a riddle typically uses one of several techniques to create a twist, which makes guessing difficult. A common technique involves double meanings. If the double meaning is in the words of the question, then the language is intentionally confusing. The asker understands a meaning and hopes that the diviner will understand the words differently.
Here’s an example: “Railway crossing, watch out for cars; can you write it without any r?” In this riddle, the asker intends that the guesser understands the word “that” as a demonstrative pronoun and tries to write “Railway crossing, beware of cars” without “r”, which is impossible. The goal is really to write the word “that” without any “r”; the first half of the sentence is used to confuse the listener while he hears the second part.
When the double meaning word or words are not stated by the asker, the puzzle may require the listener to interpret it as a pun. An example of this might be “How do we know the cook was a terrible person?” The answer is: “Because he beats eggs and whips cream”. Here the “cruelty” of the cook is understood by the multiple meanings of “beats” and “whips” both as forms of punishment and as culinary techniques.
Riddles that create false concepts
Another method of deceiving puzzles involves a deliberate attempt to trick a listener into a false conclusion. Here is an example: “A woman has seven children, half of whom are boys; How can that be possible?” This riddle is based on the idea that the guesser is likely to assume that if half of the children are boys, the other half must be girls; with an odd number, this is impossible. Recognizing this hypothesis as false, however, one can arrive at the correct answer: if all the children are boys, half of them would also be boys, although three and a half children normally don’t make much sense.
Riddles with clues
Some of the more common types of puzzles contain clues to the solution, but they need to be thought through very carefully to fully understand. One of the most famous riddles of Western civilization is the Riddle of the Sphinx, commonly formulated as “What happens on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and on three legs in the evening?” The answer is ‘humanity’, as people crawl at birth or in the morning of their lives, walk on two legs for the entire middle of their life, and may use a cane or third leg towards the ‘evening’ of their life.
Riddles in popular culture
There are several popular formats for guessing, such as songs and games or contests of intelligence. The traditional nursery rhyme that begins “I gave my love a pitted cherry” is an example of a riddle song. The contest between the hobbit Bilbo Baggins and the creature Gollum in JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit is one of the most famous guessing games in popular culture. In the Batman comics, the character called “The Riddler” often enacts elaborate crimes and uses puzzles to give Batman clues about his whims, pitting his wits against the hero.
