Riddle Me That

Where did the word come from and our obsession with word games.

Photo by Raphael Schaller on Unsplash

In David Crystal’s book The Story of English in 100 Words, word number 9 in his account is ‘riddle’. It appeared initially with a somewhat different meaning, as language tends to do. We trace it, Crystal says, to Old English when it was rædels, meaning a ‘reading’ or ‘opinion’ about something. Overtime the meaning changed, with the same basic shape, slowly becoming more like we know it today. It came to mean ‘interpretation’. It came to mean an ‘enigma’. And eventually our modern meaning emerged in the 10th century.

Crystal continues; ‘riddle’ was then applied to people, and became a verb later in the 16th century when we started describing how people could ‘speak in riddles’. Hundreds of years later we use the word as the noun and the verb and continue to have a fascination, an addiction, to word play.

We’ve adopted word play into our everyday lives. The daily Wordle, Connections, Crosswords, Cryptic Crosswords, tongue twisters, double entendres, puns. We have a lot of words to describe different forms of riddles and turning words upside down, back to front, on their head, and hidden through layers of meaning. I know I participate regularly on the New York Times app, and had a brief foray into Cryptic Crosswords (which I didn’t keep up).

Riddles also appear throughout literature, old and new. The sphinx presents riddles to Oedipus, and Bilbo Baggins faces off Gollum in a battle of words. They offer challenges of the mind, although I’m okay with my life not being on the line. Riddles are used in games, often utilised in Dungeons and Dragons to offer players a new kind of adversity that doesn’t involve striking with a sword or throwing lightning from your finger tips.

Photo by Douglas Bagg on Unsplash

Riddles and word games also seem to offer a short form of entertainment that is a respite from the fasted paced media we consume. You have to stop and think. Problem solve. Look for patterns. Work toward a solution. And there is great satisfaction when it is solved, or renewed vigour to get tomorrow’s riddle right if you got todays wrong. The New York Times app seems to be heralding this movement somewhat, and recently I deleted TikTok and paid for yearly subscription to the NYT’s in their EOFY sale.

It helps that we can still have a competitiveness or collaborative drive with these games, it has become community orientated. Working as a family to figure out the daily Wordle, or comparing results with friends to see who got it in the shortest amount of words. I still avoid the Mini Crossword as I made the mistake of joining with my friends, and always seem to have the worst time…

On that note, how do you fair with these riddles?

‘Alive without breath,
As cold as death;
Never thirsty, ever drinking,
All in mail never clinking.’

(From The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien)

‘What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?’

(The riddle the Sphinx asked Oedipus)

‘There is a house. One enters it blind and comes out seeing. What is it?’

(The oldest recorded riddle)

Answers: 1. fish, 2. a human being, 3. school