Saturday, May 23, 2009

Riddle me this

I remember a short rhyme from my childhood:

As I was going to St. Ives,
I met a man with 7 wives.
Each wife had 7 sacks,
each sack at 7 cats,
each cat had 7 kits.
Kits, cats, and wives,
how many were going to St. Ives?

Let's ignore the polygamy and animal abuse for the moment. Before you get out the calculators to multiply, there's one big gotcha here. Let's see if you notice it.

2 comments:

saythings said...

One?
I think most people don't get the old riddles and whatnot anymore, it's all about Elmo or Bob the Builder or whatever the children's marketing flavour-of-the-month is, all dumbed down and made palatable to generations increasingly incapable of thinking for themselves. Wait, is my cynicism showing?

Professor Preposterous said...

The medal of logic goes to saythings, who indeed noticed that the massive polygamous animal smuggling group was LEAVING St. Ives, and that one person, the narrator, was going there.
I suppose I can't blame you for being cynical. No one has time to bother with old culture.

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