Eccentric Flower:201004/Igry

I don't really care for puzzles, even though I am sometimes very good at doing them, because they don't strike me as time well spent. But over the years I have collected a wide variety of word-riddles and other tired old puzzles, and involuntarily committed them to memory, and ....

Immediately we run into the common-knowledge issue. As you know, Bob, I suffer from a perpetual fallacy where I assume that, if I know it, everyone else knows it. As I noted on Twitter today, in my defense:

This was a reflection on the fact that I posted in a particular forum a few word games which strike me as tired old chestnuts, and which I could never get away with in my personal social circle because they are tired chestnuts to everyone else there as well. But to these people, they were new. And there's always someone for whom they're new, and that's kinda delightful.

Here's what I asked. I would be interested to hear, just for statistical purposes, which of these you have heard a thousand times, and which are new to you:

Because the average intelligence level on the forums where I posted this appears to be approximately that of a gerbil (judging from the spelling, grammar, content level, and composition of the average post, and yes, I am a mean bitch, and yes, I do expect that you will be judged on presentation, and yes, I do think that you have an obligation to write grammatically even if you're a sixth-grader, so let's just take all that as read), I did not expect many answers.

To my great surprise, the whole list except #6 was cracked within an hour of my posting it by two people - both of whom turn out to be intelligent, articulate people capable of composing a sentence. I hadn't realized they existed. So, here's today's bombshell: Posting silly-ass word games can sometimes be Intelligent People Bait. Intelligent people are often reluctant to display intelligence, particularly when they're in an online room full of morons. This draws them out of concealment (so that we can all be ridiculed and ostracized together. Solidarity!)

In particular someone got #5 immediately, which usually is one of the hardest ones to crack. I had attempted to arrange them roughly in order of increasing difficulty. On the other hand, these are really "aha" puzzles and everyone's brain works differently, so one never knows. Whereas #1, whose answer has been known to me since I was five, took them quite a bit longer. Go figure.

Of course they could be cheating - and it's debatable whether "cheating" is even accurate. You may not realize this (and why would you?) but the internet has become the nemesis of puzzle-creation. It's simply too easy to get answers. Dan Lyke came up with so many answers so fast for #5 that he felt the whole thing was beneath contempt. He added

I hadn't even known that sort of wordmongering had a name! I intuited from his tone that he would be perfectly happy to make trivia obsolete, and I teased him about cheating, and he replied

and I don't say he doesn't have a point. But now you know: There are people in the world who find puzzles even more pointless than I do.

The fact of the matter is, while I don't really care for pencil puzzles except as a time-killer (because I know I can solve them with enough application of brain and time, but the process is not especially interesting to me), I do like an occasional solve-this-riddle puzzle like the above, and I like them even more when I can't figure out the answer, because I like the slap-your-forehead moment when you are told. Other people find them very frustrating for the same reason; they feel it's a rigged game designed to make them look and feel stupid. It's true that with many of these (unless you cheat like Dan did), it's extremely unlikely you will ever get the answer on your own, and that most of the people who know the answer know because they were told it.

On the other hand, it is possible occasionally to do some exhaustive thinking and eventually solve it on your own; the puzzles are fair. It's not like the famous -gry puzzle - again, "famous" is used semi-ironically; in my circle of weirdos you can say, "the -gry puzzle" and they'll all know what you mean without further explanation; all the normal people in the world go "huh"?

[What, you've never heard of it? You're probably better off for it. But, in case you are feeling masochistic, my favorite phrasing of it is like this: Name three common English words which end in the letters -gry. Answer below with all the other answers.]

The thing is, I think I would rather assume that my peers are my peers, rather than face evidence that they aren't - the latter depresses me when I encounter it. That means assuming that my peers are pretty intelligent (indeed, more intelligent than I am; I tend to regard myself as kinda slow, actually)*, and that they accumulate all sorts of random cruft and trivia at all times whether they want to or not, and so their reaction to most of these puzzles, like mine, is, "Oh, yeah, that's a good one," like you do to a pleasant-enough joke that you've heard before many times.

But assuming such a thing means you don't ever get the joy of telling that joke again. So once in a while it's nice to find someone who hasn't heard that joke, so you can get it out of your system for a change.

* Stop laughing, I'm quite serious. The thing is, while my information retention is very good - too good, I wish I wouldn't pick up so much lint and clutter - when it comes to actually learning how to do new things, it takes many beatings over the head for it to penetrate my thick skull. Being an ace at "Jeopardy!" due to retained factoids, while something I excel at, does not strike me as a useful skill ... and the process by which that factoid was thrown onto my mental rubbish pile and never discarded does not strike me as learning. Genuine learning, when I have to do it, is a very slow and painful process. Trust me on this.

Answers follow, so if you're still pondering the questions above, read no further.

1. Bookkeeper (and its variants, e.g. bookkeeping). Strangely, my whole life I have been assuming that this was merely the most common answer of several, when in fact it may be the only legitimate one:

2. The one most commonly used is facetious(ly). The other three I can bring to mind are abstemious(ly), arterious(ly), and arsenious(ly) - and you can see that we're really reaching by the time we get to that last one. I am one up on AskOxford, which gives some even more obscure scientific terms, but apparently either forgot arterious (pertaining to the arteries) or doesn't consider it a real word.

3. One person on the forums I mentioned came up with onomatopoeia, which impressed me greatly and made me aware that the Non-Idiots Were Coming Out Of Hiding. Because that ain't a common word except in certain very rarefied universes. The word I had in mind was queue. I added:

The views of AskOxford on this matter are rather unorthodox:

I would just like to say that, personally, I have not only never heard or used "Rousseauian" in spoken conversation, I have never seen it anywhere in written usage before today, and thus we conclude that someone at AskOxford needs to get out more.

4. Awkward. A variation on this turned up on "Jeopardy!" recently and stumped the contestants.

5. The one I had in mind was polish. Dan Lyke suggests nice, job, and herb (he notes that one may be subject to regionalisms). I still want to know if the forum guy who got this immediately had heard it before.

6. There are two answers. One is technically French, but wanders into English occasionally. It is entente. The other is quite normal, and you should take another crack at it before I give you the answer.

As for the -gry puzzle, the reason it annoys wordies is that it doesn't have a proper answer. Everyone gets angry and hungry immediately (you did get those immediately, right?) and then loses their mind trying to find a third. All third choices are obscure and/or archaic.

But there is a silver lining to this puzzle, in that it led to the creation of a very useful word, the one which is the title of the entry. I will let Francis explain; he was there, and he tells it better than I do.

That, I think, is the real merit of these silly-ass riddles; that in some people (me, as a child, for example) it leads them to wander the corridors of language in search of other Unusual Artifacts, and eventually they become one of the peculiar, obstinately intelligent, verbose, high-vocabulary humans I so adore.

Alfalfa.