Word Games, Riddles and Logic Tests Page 3
Chapter 1
Introduction to the games, riddles and verses
used in this book
This chapter explains the origin of the games, how they work, and/or the people
who invented and collected them.
Acronyms
An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of other words, e.g. pdf stands for portable document format, ASAP stands for as soon as possible. Some acronyms have become so much part of the language that most people don’t even realise that they are acronyms. For example, radar is formed from radio detection and
ranging and laser derives from light amplification by the stimulated emission of
radiation. There are now so many acronyms in the language that there are special-ised dictionaries on the subject. Chat rooms have spawned hundreds of acronyms,
e.g. IMHO = in my humble opinion.
© Springer International Publishing AG 2018
1
A. Wallwork, Word Games, Riddles and Logic Tests, Easy English!,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67241-0_1
2
Ambiguous Headlines
A sentence or phrase is ambiguous or vague when it has more than one interpreta-
tion or its interpretation is not obvious. Newspapers are notorious for producing ambiguous headlines. For example:
Police found drunk in shop window.
Magistrates act to keep theaters open.
The key words in the two cases above are drunk and act. The real meaning of the first one is that the police found a drunk (i.e. a drunk man) lying in a shop window.
The other, humorous, interpretation, is that a police officer was found drunk (i.e. the officer had been drinking). The intended meaning in the second headline is that the magistrates acted (i.e. took legal measures) to ensure that theaters would not be closed. The humorous meaning is that the magistrates acted (i.e. were actors and actresses) in theater productions designed to raise money to keep the theaters open (i.e. not shut down).
Some famous ambiguous headlines include:
1) Girl with a detective in her boot.
2) Kids make nutritious snacks.
3) Milk drinkers are turning to powder.
4) Drunk gets nine months in violin case.
Below are the explanations.
1) Intended meaning (IM): A female was being investigated. While she was driv-
ing, there was a detective in the boot of her car. Humorous meaning (HM): A girl has a detective in her shoe (boot).
2) IM: Children have been cooking snacks that contain beneficial ingredients. HM: If you want a snack, try eating a child.
3) IM: Consumers who use milk have started to use powdered milk. HM: Milk
consumers are being transformed into powder.
4) IM: A drunk man who is involved in a criminal case that regards a violin has been sentenced by a court to nine months in prison. HM: A drunk man is to
spend nine months enclosed in a violin case (i.e. a case for carrying a violin).
3
Anagrams
What do cheating and a teaching have in common?
They are anagrams of each other: the letters in cheating can be rearranged to form a new word, in this case teaching. Anagrams can be of individual words, or even of phrases or the names of people. The basic rule is that the letters of the first words or phrase must be used once and only once in the anagrammed word or phrase.
According to some historians, the first anagram was created by the Greek poet
Lycophron in 260 B.C. A collection of anagrams in English published in 1925 and
entitled Anagrammasia contained around 5,000 anagrams.
The most inventive anagrams are meaningful and relate in some way to the original subject. Below are some examples:
admirer = married
an alcoholic beverage = gal, can I have cool beer?
American = the main race
angered = enraged
the answer = wasn’t here
contemplation = on mental topic
Over the centuries anagrams have been:
• believed to have mystical or prophetic meanings
• created around religious texts
• adopted by famous people to anagram their own name
• used to record the results of scientists
• used in cryptic crosswords and puzzles journals
Before the advent of radio and the TV, educated people would pass their evenings creating anagrams. Anagrams then fell out of fashion, but have been revived by IT
experts who have created anagram-creating software enabling us to create anagrams of the most bizarre words and names.
4
If you like anagrams then try www.anagrammy.com which contains anagrams such
as the following, which have all been created (by humans not software!) since 2000.
A carton of cigarettes = I got a taste for cancer.
A crisis on Wall Street = Will start a recession.
Adult novels = Love and lust!
Archaeologists = Goal is to search.
Italian crime boss = A Sicilian mobster.
Metamorphosis = Promises a moth.
Military weapon = Employ it in a war.
New Year’s Resolution = Notions we rarely use.
The National Rifle Association = Fanatical loonies are into this.
The Pope’s view on contraception = It is one concept he won’t approve.
The President of the United States of America = Incompetent, hated head of state terrifies us.
Funny Book Titles
Funny book titles work by having a plausible title with an author’s name that in some way relates to the title. Here are some examples:
Danger by Luke Out
Blood on the Coffin by Horace Tory
Good Works by Ben Evolent
Often when we want to alert someone that there is an imminent danger we say
‘Look out’. Luke (a male first name) and look are pronounced very similarly, so the author’s name (Luke Out) fits nicely with the name of the book. A coffin is where a dead person is placed by before being buried. Blood on the Coffin gives the idea that the book will be a horror story (try saying Horace Tory quickly!). The word benevo-lent (Ben Evolent) refers to someone who wishes to do good things for other people.
5
In all cases the author’s name is designed to look realistic. Then, when it is read quickly its other meaning becomes apparent.
Here are a few more with the explanation of the author in brackets.
Artificial Clothing by Polly Ester (polyester)
At the Eleventh Hour by Justin Time (just in time)
French Overpopulation by Francis Crowded (France is crowed)
If I Invited Him... by Woody Kum (would he come?)
Mensa Man by Gene Yuss (genius)
Stop Arguing by Xavier Breath (save your breath)
The Excitement of Bird Watching by I. M. Board (I am bored)
Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll is often considered as some slightly eccentric character who wrote children’s stories set in a wonderful make believe land that appealed both to kids and adults alike.
His real name was the Reverend Charles Dodgson and he was far more than a writer.
He was born in 1832 and spent much of his childhood doing magic shows for his
brothers and sisters. He then went away to school at Rugby before getting his degree at Oxford University.
His most famous books are Alice in Wonderland, written in 1865, and Through a Looking Glass which he wrote seven years later. Alice was based on the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, which was the college at Oxford where Carroll later
became Professor of Mathematics. He was in fact a terribly boring professor, so bad in fact that his students asked for him to be replaced.
Besides writing children’s stories and mathematical treatises, he also wrote an
incredible number of l
etters. In fact from the age of 29 to his death in 1898, he wrote no less than 98,271 letters. Many of these letters were written in mirror language, or back to front, so that they had to be read from the end to the beginning, and most contained some kinds of puzzles.
In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice is a little girl who dreams that she pursues a White Rabbit down a rabbit-hole and there meets with strange adven-tures and odd characters: the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare
amongst others.
6
Carroll enjoyed converting one word into another by changing one letter at a time.
For example, he transformed hate into love in just two links:
H A T E
h a v e
h o v e
L O V E
And fish into bird in four links:
F I S H
f i s t
g i s t
g i r t
g i r d
B I R D
In Through the Looking Glass 1872, Alice walks in a dream through the looking glass into Looking-Glass House, where she finds that the people from the chess-board, particularly the red and white queens, are alive. She also meets with
Tweedledum and Tweedledee and Humpty Dumpty etc.
There are various logic games in his two Alice books. Here is one:
Someone had stolen the salt. It was found that the culprit was either the Caterpillar, Bill the Lizard, or the Cheshire Cat. The three were tried and made the following statements in court:
Caterpillar: Bill the Lizard at the salt.
Bill the Lizard: That is true!
Cheshire Cat: I didn’t eat it!
As it happened, at least one of them lied and at least one told the truth. Who ate the salt?
For the solution to this game and the one below, see the key at the end of this
section.
Carroll also had a habit of seeking out young girls and challenging them with a
mental exercise. He apparently met ‘a nice girl of about fifteen’ on her train, got her address and later sent her this puzzle:
Make sense of this sentence:
It was and I said not all.
7
When he wasn’t writing, inventing puzzles or listening to his musical box being
played backwards Carroll invented all kinds of things including a prototype travelling chess set, double-sided sticky tape, and a new Proportional Representation scheme for electing members of parliament. In Carroll’s system each candidate
could give the votes given to him to another candidate. He might well have been
the first person to make a self-photographing device and he later became one of
the leading portrait takers of his time - notably of young girls like Alice.
key
If the Cheshire Cat ate the salt, then all three are lying. If Bill ate it, then all three are telling the truth. So the Caterpillar must have eaten it.
It was ‘and’ I said, not ‘all’.
Limericks
A limerick is a humorous five-line poem. It normally follows this rhyme scheme
aabba, which means that the first two lines rhyme with each other and with the last line. The original limericks were written over 200 years ago, and were often quite vulgar for the time:
While Titian was mixing rose madder,
His model reclined on a ladder.
Her position to Titian
Suggested coition,
So he leapt up the ladder and had ‘er.
Because of this supposed vulgarity, such limericks were whispered rather than
recounted aloud!
The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that the origin of this very popular type of nonsense-verse is lost in obscurity. The first collector of limericks was Langford Reed who compiled a book entitled “The Complete Limerick” (published in 1924)
after sifting through a staggering sixteen thousand limericks, before settling on the few hundred that he felt were worthy of his book.
Limerick is actually the name of a town in Ireland and Langford Reed suggests that: this peculiar form of verse was brought direct to Limerick by the returned veter-ans of the Irish brigade, who were attached to French army for a period of
nearly 100 years from 1691.
The brigade was organized in Limerick, and when disbanded was no doubt
responsible for giving currency to many rude barrack-room songs.
Limericks have been translated into many languages.
8
Palindromes
What do you notice about this word: redivider? Well it reads the same backwards and forwards. It is a palindromic word.
Palindromes have been around for centuries, and the Greeks and Romans often
inscribed them on monuments and fountains. The inventor of the palindromic verse was apparently Sotades of Maroneia (in Thrace, Greece) who invented a palindrome to publicly criticize the king of Egypt. The king subsequently had Sotades sealed in a lead box and thrown into the sea.
A 17th century English poet, John Taylor, is credited with creating the first English palindromic sentence:
Lewd did I live, evil I did dwel.
Taylor’s palindrome basically means that he lived an improper life in improper
surroundings.
The most-quoted palindromes in English are probably:
Madam, I’m Adam.
A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.
Able was I ere I saw Elba.
The first supposedly reports Adam’s first words to Eve in Genesis. The second is a comment on the origin of the Panama Canal which was opened in 1914. And the last was supposedly Napoleon’s (the French emperor) response (in English!) on being
asked whether he had the power to continue fighting.
Another form of palindromes is with whole words rather than letters. Here are some examples
Blessed are they that believe they are blessed.
King, are you glad you are king?
Please me by standing by me please.
Says Mom, “What do you do? – You do what Mom says”.
You can cage a swallow, can’t you, but you can’t swallow a cage, can you?
9
Proverbs and Idioms
Proverbs are words of wisdom or advice that have been passed down from one gen-
eration to the next. Some come from the Bible, for example:
All that glisters is not gold.
The love of money is the root of all evil.
The above proverb is actually very often misquoted as simply ‘Money is the root of all evil’.
Several English proverbs have a literary origin, for example those made famous by Shakespeare:
All’s well that ends well.
Hoist by his own petard.
The true course of love never did run smooth.
Too much of a good thing.
But most are simply derived from folk wisdom, i.e. the experience of our ancestors encapsulated into a short expression:
Variety is the spice of life.
Prevention is better than cure.
It takes all sorts to make a world.
You can’t tell a book by its cover.
Familiarity breeds contempt.
Two heads are better than one.
Some proverbs contradict each other, so we have:
Many hands make light work. vs Too many cooks spoil the broth.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder vs Out of sight, out of mind.
More haste, less speed. vs He who hesitates is lost.
Nothing venture, nothing gain. vs Better safe than sorry.
10
Riddles
Riddles are common to all cultures. Probably the most famous riddle in Europe
from a historical point of view is the one derived from a Greek legend in which the Sphinx (a mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion) would devour all travellers who could not answer it.
This riddle ha
s come down to us in many forms, the most common English form
being:
What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the
evening?
According to the legend, the hero, Oedipus, gave the right answer: Man. So angry was the Sphinx that she killed herself - according to some by throwing herself off a cliff, and according to others by devouring herself.
Another famous riddle is:
A man looking at a portrait says: “Brothers and sisters have I none, but that
man’s father is my father’s son.”
The related question is “Who is the subject of the portrait”? The answer is the son of the speaker.
The above riddle highlights two aspects of the traditional format of riddles in
English. First they rhyme ( none rhymes with son). Second, they often contain archaic grammar forms: Today no one would say or write brothers and sisters have I none, but rather I don’t have any brothers or sisters.
Most of the riddles in the chapters of this book are related to the double meaning of a word.
Here are some explanations for various riddles to give you an idea of how they
work.
Why are the pages of a book like the days of men?
Because they are numbered.
11
The key word is numbered. In terms of books, each page has a number. In terms of men (i.e. humans in general), we all have a limited number of days (years) in our life - numbered in this case means finite rather than infinite.
Why is a room packed with married people like an empty room?
Because there is not a single person in it.
The key word is single person, which means both no one (empty room) and unmarried.
Why is a mirror like a resolution?
Because it is so easily broken.
The key word here is broken, but in this case it is not a double meaning but simply in the case of a mirror the word broken is used in a real concrete sense, whereas in relation to a resolution broken has a metaphorical sense. If for example you say “I will stop eating chocolate” you have made a resolution, if then
after a couple of weeks you start eating chocolate again, then you have ‘broken’