So where did this riddle come (back) from? A television show of some kind, I take it? (I don't watch TeeVee.) It seems to be popping up everywhere but only in the past week or so.
A very similar riddle was told to me by my great-aunt when I was just a sprat, and the answer she gave me then (only after many weeks, the ol bat
....) still fits. And that's the fun of a riddle. You try to work it out for yourself.
I'll give you a slight clue, though. The original version of this riddle that I heard used slightly different words. And, most good riddles
aren't simply word-completion puzzles where you look for a single missing word, prefix or suffix. If this is some kind of a contest, as I surmise that it is, anyone would know about regular expressions and
/usr/share/dict/words. Someone would have done that and posted it before the night was through.
Usually a part of the puzzle is intended to set your mind off onto what might be the wrong track, such as
"my name isn't work, but ..." But it could also be just to make it rhyme. In the Victorian era, riddles were a favorite form of parlor entertainment. Some are dated now, but many are not. Consider, for example, just how many interpretations there are for the word "before."
Oh, this is rich. And it seems to have been a great promotion for
answers.yahoo.com since every single "hit" on the phrase leads there and, curiously, nowhere else.
