One way to come up with riddles is to give an entirely absurd answer to a normal question someone's asked you,
then take that same answer you gave and try to come up with a question where that would actually be the answer,
then take that back and twist it around a lot so it's harder to tell that that's what it's actually asking.
For example:
On a Philosophy-oriented table group at your University's study halls,
when talking about Mortality,
"What will be the last word you ever say before you die? " is the topic for discussion...
They come out with things like "love", or "remember", or "forever" and all that.
I come out with this: "Know".
They are like, wait, you mean "No" -- like you're trying to tell someone not to kill you or like you are refusing to do what they asked and stay alive or somethin'?
I'm like, No, I mean "Know" as in "K-N-O-W Know".
They ask me why that's my answer of course.
I say this -- that I can't tell what exactly is the cirumstance but it comes at the end of a particular sentence.
They're like... "what sentence? "
So I tell 'em "I don't know".
They pause a bit.
I continue and drop the hammer: I don't know what I will be the last word I ever say out loud before I die.
But if you ask me what my answer to that is, "I don't know" is the answer that I give you, and "know" is technically the last word at the end of that sentence...
So I come out with "know" as my answer to when you ask me what's the last word.
It dawns on them quickly as I'm just finishing saying this and we all start crackin' up about it before I even finish the sentence.
A lotta people be like "shoot", and one guy goes, because you want them to shoot you?
And he goes like no because I said "don't shoot! ".
It's pretty clear that they're riding on my coattails.
But they don't know that that's what they're doing.
So you can come back with a riddle like this: A Man is asked what will be the last word he ever speaks aloud before he dies.
He replies that he can't tell them what his last spoken word will be but can give them the sentence.
After this exchange of words that same individual who asked him this already knows the answer: "know".
What was the sentence?
There's a lot of thinly veiled references to 'Federal Execution' in there because of how it's worded, full of red herrings like that, so you wind up tripping yourself up without knowing that you're tripping yourself up.
When you finally give up and answer like "I don't f****** know! " you suddenly realize you just answered the riddle by how you worded things yourself out of your frustration.
You spend all that time going over details meticulously only to find, when you've solved it, that its answer was really freakin' obvious if you would have just seen what it was clearly and thought of it there at the time.
Like a real riddle should be.
People might say you can't actually come up with riddles 'just like that', that they kinda just come up from unknown sources, and permeate one's culture like quirks of Language in general.
Yet you actually can come up with riddles deliberately, following specific methods you develop yourself, like any other practice... if you get in good habits of writing things down when you think of them... and have a good imagination so that you do ever think of them.
Anyway I don't have a close circle of good acquaintances that I hang out with at a University Campus that cracks jokes about Philosophy together and all of that good stuff.
I would love to have that though.
What is his sentence?
Moderator: Quantum P.