We can pair up the cryptic answers with the riddle answers and perform the substitutions on the riddle answers.
"When is a mummy not a mummy?" Besides being your four-year-old's new favorite riddle (answer: "When it's a daddy"), that's also the question posed by an exhibition on the ancient Peruvian and Egyptian dead that opened recently at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York.
Traditionally, a drum is sounded when the riddle is answered correctly.
No, that is not a riddle that, answered correctly, will earn admittance to some secret golf society.
The winged sphinx of Boeotian Thebes, the most famous in legend, was said to have terrorized the people by demanding the answer to a riddle taught her by the Muses—What is it that has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?—and devouring a man each time the riddle was answered incorrectly.
This riddle is best answered with a textbook parable.
An organization runs a competition by proposing a riddle it needs answered and offering years of data.
How John Snow answered the riddle of cholera in 1854.
One parodist in 1896 answered the riddle: "But why should my name be quite forgot/ Who rode as boldly and well, God wot?/ Why should I ask?
Our last Ambassador there, Graham Martin, and his staff answered the riddle by conjuring illusions, misleading Washington (and finally themselves) about Saigon's strength and Hanoi's weaknesses -all to keep Congressional support for the South Vietnamese intact.
Lord Redcliff-Maud, a Whitehall mandarin known for his impressive intellect and safe hands, answered the riddle of urban conurbations sitting on a structure designed for rural life by proposing new local councils based on major towns - so-called unitary authorities.
