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At A Loss For WordsDate Added: Sept. 20, 2002
The mythical "magic pop-up" rears its head again. This time, the technological impossibility is supposed to deliver the solution to an impossible riddle. A Riddle - I hope you can figure this out! RIDDLE THAT'LL KILL YOUR BRAIN! This is going to make you so MAD! There are three words in the English language that end in "gry". ONE is angry and the other is hungry. EveryONE knows what the third ONE means and what it stands for. EveryONE uses them everyday, and if you listened very carefully, I've given you the third word. What is it?
Send this to 5 People and the answer will pop up on the screen automatically. By now, seasoned chain-breakers will recognize that it doesn't matter if you send this riddle to5 people... or 50 people, nothing will automatically "pop up" on your screen. An E-mail does not have the capability of registering how many times you forward it, let alone make something happen once you hit a certain number. The magical pop-up hoax often appears in the form of a joke or riddle absent a punchline or solution (like the old lady at the grocery store hoax). So, what is the solution to this riddle? As it's written above, the riddle makes little sense and has no solution. If you wanted to stretch at it, you could claim the answer was "three" ("the third word" in the message), but this was not likely the intention of the riddle's creator. That's because the version above is the result of years of mangling the riddle's structure and meaning until it just doesn't make any sense. However, when written properly, the riddle has a definite - and somewhat clever - solution: "Think of words ending in -GRY. Angry and hungry are two. There are only three words in the English language. What is the third word? The word is something that everyone uses every day. If you have listened carefully, I have already told you what it is." The answer is "Language." The first two sentences are unrelated to the riddle and only there to throw you off. Thus, the core riddle is "There are only three words in "the English language." What is the third word?" Fact is, there are many more than three words in the English language that end in -gry, though none of them are nearly as common as "angry" and "hungry". Nobody seems to know how the current form of the riddle came to be (for instance, why "ONE" is capitalized), but there are at least 6 other variations floating around. Most of them make as little sense as this one. Break this Chain! References: Ask Dr. Dictionary (Dictionary.com) |