The Riddle Project

Dress the Part! The Costumes of Conundrum Suppers

2020-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Protestant Churches would often host fundraising events called Conundrum Suppers. At these events, guests would order from menus entirely composed of riddles! Yet riddling menus were not the only entertainment. Performances and games were often on the agenda as well. Many guests even came in costume!

During the second half of the 19th century, clothing culture changed dramatically around the world as industrial production made clothing more varied and accessible.[1] You can see this through newspaper commentary on one Conundrum Supper, at which hosts arrived in costume “such as Martha Washington might have worn.”[2]

Not all events demanded guests dress like the upper classes. More often, guests were invited to dress ‘down’, arriving in the attire of the lower echelons of society. In the example to the right, hosts dressed in “hard-time” costumes and asked guests to arrive without finery! Had their party been held ten years later, after the stock market crash, such instructions might have struck a sour note. In one other pre-stock market crash party, hosts described their Conundrum Supper as a “poverty social,” in which “a prize will be given for the poorest dressed person there.”[3] Dress and you shall receive.

Find out more here. Do you have a disguised riddle to share? Let us know on our Instagram account, we post weekly! You can also reach out to @McGillLib, @McGillRoaar or email theriddleprojectmcgill@gmail.com.

[1] See “Nineteenth-Century Clothing” in the online Encyclopedia of Fashion, http://www.fashionencyclopedia.com/fashion_costume_culture/European-Culture-19th-Century/Nineteenth-Century-Clothing.html. [2] The Yonker’s Statesman 20 February 1902. [3] The Brookfield Courier 06 November 1918.

The Literary Ritual of Conundrum Suppers

2020-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Shakespeare added thousands of words to the English language, wrote both drama and poetry, and even bought himself a noble title! But was he a riddler? Apparently, literature and riddles have always been related.[1] As The Riddle Project dove into Conundrum Supper events from the 20th century (events in which guests ordered from menus all in riddles) we came across a unique specimen.

“A Shakespearean Luncheon” is the title of an 1898 Kansas newspaper article. It contains the description of a Conundrum social hosted by ladies of the “Christian church” along with its menu – described in unsolved riddles, all constructed from Shakespearean quotations! Conundrum Suppers were flexible affairs, and so lent themselves to addressing different themes. Not surprisingly, literature-themed socials were favoured when organized by such literary societies as “Social Purity Band and Literary Club,” the “St. James Amateur Dramatic and Literary Society,” and the “Warwick Road Literary and Debating Society.”

Shakespeare was not the exclusive literary rite of Conundrum Suppers! As another newspaper from 1898 demonstrates, organizers scoured works by Christopher Marlowe, Alexander Pope, and more for quotations to construct their riddle questions.[2] How many can you find?

Find out more here. Do you have a Conundrum Supper story to recount? Let us know on our Instagram account, we post weekly! You can also reach out to @McGillLib, @McGillRoaar or email theriddleprojectmcgill@gmail.com.

[1] Even Sappho, widely regarded as the first poet in Western Culture, was known for riddling. See Elanor Cook’s Enigmas and Riddles in Literature, especially pp. 137. [2] The daily morning journal and courier February 21, 1898.

Comical Conundrums: What’s So Funny?

2020-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Have you ever ordered food, just to be greeted with a dish of roaring laughter? At the fin de siècle of the 20th century, guests would gather at events called Conundrum Suppers, in which diners would order from menus written entirely in riddles. What was the point of this puzzling pastime? Well…because it was fun!

Clever guests would be pleased when their food arrived. However, the success of the event hinged on unfortunate victims! Following the orders, “[a]ll manner of laughable mistakes and surprises are sure to follow,”[1] because it was amusing to try and guess what your meal might be, “and many a person got rather a queer supper by his unlucky guesses.”[2] Some of the riddles were also funny jokes! Some “Elevated Felines,” perhaps? (Catsup, or Ketchup, in other words!)

The link between riddling menus and humour existed since at least the early 18th century. Last year, McGill acquired a comical riddling manuscript drawn by William Heath. Books like these were rented out by publishers “for evening parties, at which these portfolios of caricatures became a very fashionable amusement.”[3] Comical publications occasionally found their way to the riddling dinner table, producing hearty laughter.[4]

Find out more here. Do you have a comical riddle to share? Let us know on our Instagram account, we post weekly! You can also reach out to @McGillLib, @McGillRoaar or email theriddleprojectmcgill@gmail.com.

[1] El Paso Daily Herald 19 November 1898 [2] Lewiston Evening Journal 21 January 1893 [3] The Quarterly Review John Murray, 1866 [4] One event mentions a “picture gallery” and another a “unique art exhibition” for guests to enjoy. See St. Lawrence Republican and Ogdensburgh Weekly Journal 06 March 1901 and Cortland Standard 03 March 1893.

Call Me By My Name: The Nomenclature of Riddling Dinners

2020-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

When we first discovered Conundrum Suppers – events in which guests order from menus written entirely in riddles – the name seemed oddly fitting. It described a meal served forth as unsolved puzzles.

Funnily enough, it is because of the name “Conundrum Suppers” that it took The Riddle Project such a long time to uncover this tradition. Initially, we had used advanced search tools to discover Enigmatic Bills of Fare, related riddling events popularized in the 18th and early 19th centuries. However, by the end of the century, Enigmatic Bills of Fare were on the decline, eclipsed by this other form of meal-time riddle ways, known by an entirely different name. So, they never showed up in our original searches.

Even then the name “Conundrum Supper” was used in consistently. But as we discovered, these events were also occasionally referred to as “Conundrum Socials” or “Conundrum Teas.” Some omitted the “Conundrum” entirely! The Riddle Project has since found them under names as obscure and diverse as “Cobweb Social,” “Yellow Tea,” “Stock(ing) Social,” “Pedro Party,” “Bean Social” or “Bean Contest,” “Daffy Social,” and “Stunt Social.” How many more riddling dinners could be hiding in plain sight?

Find out more here. Do you have an undercover riddling dish to share? Let us know on our Instagram account, we post weekly! You can also reach out to @McGillLib, @McGillRoaar or email theriddleprojectmcgill@gmail.com.

Festive Fundraising with Conundrum Suppers

2020-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

“All who attend will be assured of having a good social time, an excellent supper, and of becoming acquainted with the wonders and mysteries of a ‘Conundrum Supper’.”[1]

Eager participants in Conundrum Socials, fashionable dining entertainments of late 19th and early 20th century America, preferred the pleasures of puzzling food descriptions to plainer ones. Care to have some “Boston’s Overthrow” with your meal? If so, you would receive tea!

Conundrum Socials were fun, flexible and very functional as fundraising events. To date we have found more than 1,361 Conundrum events. Games customarily took place before eating, and conundrum-themed performances accompanied the meal. Guests might even arrive in costume.[2] Most often, innovative menus included dishes described entirely in riddling form. One menu was composed of Shakespearean quotes.[3] Another references chemical formulas. A dish described as “H2O, 100 Degrees Centrigrade, with Alpho-Amida-acetic acid” would be soup![4] Ordering from these riddling menus was a culinary adventure for diners.

The craze for Conundrum Socials dwindles by 1920, but why? Could it be related to the introduction of Prohibition in the US? To a changed social mood post WW1? To the popularity of radio, which drew audiences away from live, locally organized events? These questions underpin our current research in The Riddle Project.

Find out more here. Do you have a Conundrum Social story to share? Let us know on our Instagram account, we post weekly! You can also reach out to @McGillLib, @McGillRoaar or email theriddleprojectmcgill@gmail.com.

[1] The Port Jervis Union May 13, 1892

[2] The Yonkers Statesman February 21, 1902

[3] The Goodland republic March 04, 1898

[4] St. Lawrence Republican and Ogdensburgh Weekly Journal December 20, 1911

What is this?!

2020-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Look closely at this page from an 1804 British manuscript and you might notice the diagram for a table setting. Do the labels reveal what diners might have enjoyed for dinner at a 19th century mansion? Well, yes and no. While it shows what will be on the table and where, the names of the dishes themselves are only given as riddles. A Baronet? (Sir Loin!)

This single page was our first clue that such a puzzling pastime existed. It is mentioned neither by food scholars nor social historians.

And so, our hunt began, and turned into The Riddle Project.

Such disguised dishes appeared on what were known as “Enigmatic Bills of Fare,” puzzling menus for the pleasure of diners in 18th and 19th century Britain.

These menus are still puzzling today, and not only for obvious reasons. What was the purpose of these soirées? Were diners expected to identify solutions before receiving their supper? Or were such Bills of Fare written mementos of a fine dining experience that included stimulating company and conversation?

To answer these questions, we first had to find more examples. To date we have found dozens of Enigmatic Bills of Fare from North America and the UK containing hundreds of unique riddles.

Find out more here. To stay involved, follow us on Instagram! You can also reach out to @McGillLib, @McGillRoaar or email theriddleprojectmcgill@gmail.com.

How do riddles move from EBoF to EBoF?

2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Enigmatic Bills of Fare (EBoFs) frequently share the same lines, suggesting that there is a transfer of riddles from supper to supper. This raises the immediate question of how and why this is happening. Are riddles being shared based on their physical location? Are riddles being shared in a timely fashion, such that recurring riddles tend to come up in bursts and then fade away? Or is it random: Do riddles just pop up randomly as a sometime fad?

To represent the transfer of riddles from EBoF to EBoF, we constructed a network representing our data set of EBoFs and the lines (individual riddles) shared between them. This data set includes 34 EBoFs (composed of a set of lines) and 246 lines that appear in at least two EBoFs.

For example: The Divine Part of Man appears in 23 EBoFs, including BOF_13. To see how this line fits in, here is an excerpt from BOF_13:

242.-AN ENIGMATICAL DINNER. MEAT, GAME, FOWL AND FISH.

The ornamental part of the head.
The divine part of man.
A tailor’s implement.
A blockhead.
The Grand Seigniors Dominions.

[…]

First, of course, can you figure out answer to The Divine Part of Man? In other words, the meal that is represented by the riddle?

It’s heart, or sole.

At any rate, the EBoF goes on; there are 39 unique lines contained in this riddle alone. Each line has its own answer, representing a dish to be served at that enigmatical dinner. Now, on to the graph representation of these connections:

Each node in this network represents an EBoF, labelled with its unique ID. (You can see BOF_13 in the top center of the graphic.) The edges between nodes represent a shared line between two EBoFs, and the weight of the edge signifies the number of lines shared between two EBoFs.

Once the network was constructed, we used the Louvain community detection algorithm to determine clusters and the modularity score of the network. Each node is colored by the cluster it is a part of (there are four unique clusters). The green cluster contains 13 nodes, the purple cluster contains 16 nodes, the orange cluster contains 5 nodes, and the blue cluster only contains BOF_3, which had no shared lines with any other BOF.

Clusters are divided very cleanly by period: 75% of BOFs in the purple cluster are post-1824 (the median year of publication), 92% of BOFS in the green cluster are pre-1824, and 80% of EBoFs in the orange cluster are post-1824. This is a strong indicator that proximity by time is an influence on how lines from BOFs are distributed. In other words, it is likely that riddles from EBoFs were extremely temporal, and maybe even “trendy.” The best riddles likely moved from dinner to dinner in a short span of time before fading into obscurity.

Tested purity by publishing location was less revealing because most EBoFs from this set were published in England. Every cluster had roughly 60% purity by region, with all being majority EBoFs from London.

Find out more here. To stay involved, follow us on Instagram! You can also reach out to @McGillLib, @McGillRoaar or email theriddleprojectmcgill@gmail.com.

New SSHRC Funding for The Riddle Project

2019-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has granted support to the project over the next two years to investigate this new genre from an interdisciplinary angle. The team, led by Nathalie Cooke, Associate Dean of ROAAr, includes an energetic team of research assistants as well as collaborators from across the departments of the McGill Library. Librarians, digitization specialists, cataloguers and researchers will work together to shed new light on the newly Identified sub-genre of Enigmatical Bills of fare (Ebfs).

Here is a taste of the work to come from Project lead, Nathalie Cooke:

A Baronet? A Beau? The First Temptation and a Slight Gust? Imagine trying to decipher your dinner menu through a game of words. This research program was prompted by such a curiosity: an 1805 handwritten diagram of a table setting in which each dish was described only by riddles. (By the way, answers to those included above are Sir Loin, Macaroni, and Apple Puff, in case you are wondering what’s for dinner.) Since that initial discovery, I have identified more riddling menus, often titled “enigmatical bills of fare” (Ebfs). Some are formally printed, others scribbled by hand. Without exception they are without the riddles’ solutions. Why would one curate and serve a menu of riddles? What was the function of food that was good only for thought? How do these Table Setting riddles figure within the larger evolution of the riddle tradition?

Congratulations to the Team!

Find out more here. To stay involved, follow us on Instagram! You can also reach out to @McGillLib, @McGillRoaar or email theriddleprojectmcgill@gmail.com.

Digital Humanities and the Gale dataset

2019-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

This post is a writeup on a computational analysis of a corpus of riddles obtained from the Gale Group. This corpus is about 3,000 riddles, each tagged with information including publication date, publisher, location, and author. Nearly all of the riddles in this set were published in London, England. There were several main parts to the analysis: First, an analysis of riddle syntax and difficulty by measuring changes in type-token ratio and reading ease score over time. Second, a study of the differentiability of riddles by classifying and measuring the quality of the classification. Finally, a set of analyses to test the capabilities of the built-in analytics tools in the Gale Digital Scholar Lab.

Riddle syntax and difficulty

Questions: Is there gender bias in riddling? Is there a semantic change in riddling from more child-like to more adult-like over time? All analysis was conducted using the Gale dataset.

Type-token ratio

The riddles have an average TTR of 0.546 with a standard deviation of 0.125. The baseline TTR in standard written English is about 0.5, so the riddles do not fall notably higher or lower.

Riddle complexity

Of the ~3,000 riddle corpus from Gale, the average Flesch reading score for an individual riddle is 90.90, with a standard deviation of 7.10, a maximum score of 114.62 and a minimum score of 23.11. Given the small standard deviation, the riddles are of relatively similar difficulty.

The graph above visualizes changes in riddle complexity over time. However, because only 158 of the 2,166 riddles tagged by date occur before 1850, early data not as strong an indicator of general complexity as late data. 50\% of riddles in this data set occur after 1878. The graph shows a consistency in riddle complexity over time, rather than a progression towards more simplistic language. In other words, more child-like riddling in later periods does not occur by this metric.

Riddles do, however, tend to increase in length over time. Late-period riddles are longer than early period riddles. Riddles from “Our Young Folk’s Weekly Budget” increased significantly in length over that period, shown above. Riddles from “Our Young Folk’s Weekly Budget” were published between 1877 and 1889; it published the largest number of riddles (562 of 2,166 riddles) of any publisher in the dataset.

Gender bias and pronoun usage in riddling

I tracked the total number of either male (he, him, etc.), female (she, her, etc.), or neutral (they, them, etc.) words as a percentage of total word count of the texts. Using these metrics, I found that 1.09\% of all tokens are male-related, 0.42\% of all tokens are female related, and 1.37\% of all tokens are neutral. This is a roughly 2:1 ratio of male pronouns to female pronouns across all riddles, which is similar to the ratio of men to women in most written works.

There is an average of 10.95 male-related words per riddle (std. 17.71), 4.26 female-related words per riddle (std. 8.89), and 13.63 neutral related words per riddle (std. 17.58). The high standard deviations suggest that the majority of riddles have a low number of personal pronouns, with significant outliers having a large number of pronouns.

The average number of personal pronouns as a percentage of tokens per riddle increased slightly in late period riddles as compared to early riddles, suggesting an increase in the personal aspect of riddling. Riddling using personal pronouns may indicate a shift in the style of riddling over time to becoming more people-focused. Close-reading late period riddles compared to early period riddles may help illuminate this trend. Again, it is worth noting that 50\% of riddles in this set were written after 1878.

Possible close-reading

I identified several significant riddles for close reading based on this data. These texts help illuminate differences between male-centered and female-centered riddles. Both riddles were published in “The Friendly Companion and Illustrated Instructor”; the male-centered riddle on August 1st, 1893 and the female-centered riddle on July 1st, 1893.

The text with the largest proportion of male pronouns (10.92\% of tokens are male-related):

BIBLE ENIGMA. WITH luxury and wealth he did abound; No lack was in his sumptuous dwelling found; But, midst the various things which he possess’d, One thing was his which far outweigh’d therest, ‘Twas his, nor knew he how with it to part, Although no pleasure did this thing impart ‘Twas ever with him, ever in his sight, And swallow’d up his other treasures quite, Till, travelling to a distant pleasant land, He took this thing and an obedient band Of servants with him; for, an urgent case Had cansed his journey to this noted place. He stayed awhile, and then he turn’d to go. He reach’d his native land again; but, lo! This thing, so long his own, he left behind, Without the slightest wish again to find. But one there was who covetous had grown, Not satisfied with things which were his own; Grasping forbidden treasure, to his cost He found the very thing the other lost. He found it and he parted with it never; God in his judgment, made it his for ever,- In mercy took it from the man of wealth And made it his who would be rich by stealth. “Friendly Companions,” it may be that you Will guess at once the thing I have in view; While you to whom it still remains a mystery, May find it in the page of Sacred History. Oxford. R
The text with the largest proportion of female pronouns (7.02\% of tokens are female-related):

BIBLE ENIGMA. MANY centuries ago, a company of travellers a>a been seen going from Mesopotamia toward that Canaan near to where Joshua gave Reuben his inheb Among this company was one intent on evil. I with him servants and one who usually accompani0 on his journeys, but she knew not of his intents. way, she saw something in front of them, which frighted her that she turned aside into the fielde pass it; this so annoyed the man that he struck compelled her to go on with them; further on, shes same again and refused to go further, whereupon her with his staff; she remonstrated with him forhis asking him some pointed questions; this, and her to go forward, so enraged him, that he threatenedif a weapon he would have killed her. He afterwardsl she had saved his life. Who was this man P r was sheP She has been dead many years; but neither in heaven nor yet in hell. Who is she, nid can she beP Also, was there anything particulara h language which we should do well to regard? Allington. GEosur I

Classification

Question: Are riddles distinguishable from each other based on (a) date of publication and (b) publication source? If so, what are distinguishing features of those riddles? All classification was conducted using the Gale dataset.

Findings

Using logistic regression, I classified riddles based on their period. Riddles were split into two sets: pre-1878 and post-1878. Of the 2,166 riddles tagged by year, half occur before 1878 and half occur afterwards. The earliest riddle is from 1800, and the latest riddle is from 1899. Every riddle tagged with a date was published in London.

Below is a list of the top 10 features associated with each set using five-fold cross-validation, which was 73% accurate with 15% standard deviation. The most distinctive features of late riddles (in order from most to least predictive) are “bi”, “tourna”, “shark”, “agan”, “wastes”, “picnics”, “sixpence”, “teviot”, “riddle”, and “privelege”. The most distinctive features of early riddles (in the same order): “puzzled”, “charad”, “pilford”, “num”, “christened”, lettre”, “dots”, and “behavior”. A 30-fold classifier was 79% accurate with a 16\% standard deviation. The most distinctive features are were similar to the first list.

I then classified the set of riddles using the subset of riddles published by the four publications who published the highest number of riddles. There are riddles from 43 different journals in this dataset. Riddles published only in the four most journals with the highest number of riddles published comprise 38\% of the total riddles. All of the four journals were published in London. The first pass was to classify only the riddles from those journals by period, using the same specifications as above. The accuracy was 88\% with a standard deviation of 16\%. The most distinctive features of late riddles only published in the most popular journals are “ridd”, “friendless”, “friday”, “nigger”, “wordl”, “doth”, “saxon”, “sixpence”, “wora”, and “ogle”. The most distinctive features of early riddles only published in the most popular journals are “character”, “eni”, “iho”, “engish”, “lettere”, “instance”, “peop”, “curses”, and “fourt”. Then, I classified by publication using only riddles from the four most popular journals where each of the jounals is considered a class. Using 30-fold classification, the accuracy of the classifier was 97.4% with 3.7% standard deviation. Using the 5-fold classifier, the model was 96.6% accurate with 2.1% standard deviation.

Finally, I defined a binary comparison between riddles from the four most popular journals and riddles published in any of the other 39 journals. Using a 30-fold classifier, the model was 90.8\% accurate with a 7.5\% standard deviation. The most distinctive features of journals with fewer riddles are “puzzledomians”, “pasted”, “enigia”, “dotted”, “answered”, “thns”, “agatha”, “pictobial”, “appealed”, and “puzzled”. The most distinctive features of journals with more riddles: “accept”, “tours”, “tourna”, “iute”, “enigm”, “crabbe”, “downs”, “engish”, “friendless”, and “charad”

Implications

Riddles are far more distinguishable based on source of publication than based on time of publication. The much lower accuracy rate of the classifier when determining the binary early/late period of the riddle as opposed to sorting the riddle into one of four distinct classes (the most popular publications) shows a strong bias towards publisher when considering what differentiates sets of riddles.

The different distinguishing features, particularly classifying the language of the most popular journals over time, suggests ways in which the lexicon of riddling shifted over time. Meta-words (“enigma”, “tourna”, “charad”, etc.) naming the riddles show how a definition of riddling changed. and the n-word as a distinguishing feature of late-period popular riddles suggests racial influences on riddling.

Differences in the distinctive features of riddling publications with more riddles and riddling publications with fewer riddles are largely in the type of riddle being published. For instance, whether a riddle is a “puzzledomain” or a “charade” distinguishes the publications from one another.

Possible problems and future work

The riddles contained in this data set are messy. Their content is transcribed digitally, so there are many strange characters and nonsense words in the data. This could lead to problems with the feature collection of the classifier: different spellings can lead to errors or missed patterns. Several of the most distinctive words are nonsense words.

I have not yet compiled a distinctive feature set for each of the four most popular publications. Because it is a non-binary comparison, identifying distinctive features requires a pair-wise comparison between each of the journals. This could be completed in future work. Riddles could also be classified between publications intended for male audiences and publications intended for female audiences to study the gendered differences in publishing.

There are also possible confounders in the results. When classifying based on time, it is possible that certain words never appear in early riddles and only appear in late riddles. This demonstrates a shift in lexicon, but does not show that a word is more distinctive in its tangible usage in one text as compared to another. This trend could be studied by analyzing the appearances of distinctive words over time and visualizing those appearances in order to gauge language that is more or less distinctive in its relative usage.

Mapping

Question: How does the location of riddling change over time? This is an ongoing project. The plan is to build a JS time-slider using Mapbox that visualizes riddle publication locations over time. Update: The time slider portion of this project is complete and accessible on this website!

Gale Digital Scholar Lab

Sentiment analysis and clustering

I also used the Gale digital scholar lab to perform basic DH analysis on the texts. While incredibly convenient, the Gale analyses lack data transparency that would be useful to extrapolate a better understanding of the texts being used.

Sentiment analysis offers an interesting look at how sentiment varies over time using the accepted AFINN model for sentiment analysis. It would be useful to offer other models for different studies in sentiment. For instance, NRC Emotion Lexicon could help analyse the text in more terms than simply positive-negative, and Bing Liu’s sentiment dictionary could offer a second model for positive-negative to compare to the AFINN model.

The unsupervised clustering offered here would be interesting to compare to the supervised classification work offered above. It would be useful if purity scores based on metadata were offered for the classes. Even though there are two transparent clusters generated in the Lab, it is unclear exactly what those clusters represent. It is possible to merge the dataframe representing the clustering with the existing metadata using document IDs, but given the non-standard naming scheme for documents, this is not trivial. Offering built-in purity scores for each metadata for the documents would be incredibly useful. It could answer questions about the natural tendency for documents to group together based on publication, time period, or textual content, based on distinguishing features of the different clusters. In addition, inclusion of supervised classification based on metadata, such as in the earlier section, would also be another interesting way to view the data.

N-grams and part-of-speech comparisons

Other tests are also interesting, but lack transparency or strong metadata inclusion. It is difficult to understand patterns in data without comparisons. The part-of-speech tagger is a very interesting tool, but only tracks based on author. It would be very useful to have a native analyzer where the metadata to be tracked can be chosen. How does adverb usage compare between publications?

It would also be useful if non-dictionary words could be removed from the dataset in the cleaning configuration. Removal of non-alphabet characters is a very useful feature, but further parsing the data would also help clarify the results.

Conclusions

Generally speaking, the Gale Digital Scholar lab offers incredibly powerful tools that are very intuitive to use. However, it is difficult to dig deeper below the surface of the data without being able to customize the results. Automatic identification of documents that are outliers to the data, feature identification, and additional metadata tagging would be make the tools in the lab incredibly useful alongside their convenience and ease of use.

More information in the help section of each tool would also be useful. Further clarification on the specific algorithm for each test and its strengths and weaknesses would help inform users about the tools at their disposal and guide users to choose the right tools for their dataset.

To learn more about The Riddle Project visit our website. To stay involved, follow us on Instagram! You can also reach out to @McGillLib, @McGillRoaar or email theriddleprojectmcgill@gmail.com.

Loving in truth and fain in Riddle my love to show: Mother’s Day Acrostics with The Riddle Project

2019-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality”[1]– James Joyce

Timeless Riddles is back with some more perplexing puzzles to unpack. Was anyone able to solve the rebus from last time? The solution is ‘TOBACCO’. The riddle basically breaks down the word into visual descriptions. ‘T’ is three-fourths of a cross, ‘O’ is a circle complete, ‘B’ is comprised of two semi-circles and a perpendicular, ‘A’ is a triangle on two legs, both ‘C’s are semi-circles, and ‘O’ is another complete circle! Brilliant, isn’t it?

Today we have a Mother’s Day special for all of you power riddlers! The Acrostic. The acrostic is another kind of visual riddle. This riddle also uses the visual arrangement of letters to reveal its answer, but in a slightly different way from rebuses. Its solution is made up of the first letter of each sentence.

If you follow each in descending order, you’ll find out the answer to this acrostic:

Mira have Pity and forgive my Crime

Inspir’d by thee, I Dare attempt to Rhime,

Superior Charms are in your Person seen;

Such as ye Poets feign the Gyptian Queen.

More Lively colours than ye Rose can Boast,

Adam your Cheeks in Admiration Lost,

Regarding BEAUX the Pow’r of Beauty feel

You Wounds, you Conquer but forget to Seal.

Know Lovely Maid you Excellent so Great

Is past ye Arts of Language to Relate

No Longer Free thy Pow’r. I fully Prove

Gains on ye Heart and Ripens into Love.

See how the first letter of each sentence makes up a name? The solution to this acrostic is ‘Miss Mary King’. As Mother’s Day is right around the corner, think of it as an adorable way to say thank you to a parent! How about you try one yourselves? This one is an acrostic enigma! Each sentence must be solved individually. Then, use the answers to arrive at the solution for the whole riddle.

That goddess who sprung from Jupiter’s brain;

What Bacchus is crown’d with as poets feign;

A bird that rises when morning just breaks;

An instrument whose sound courage awakes;

Eho charm’d with his music the rocks and the trees;

A fabulous god that guards the green seas.

The initials above when rightly you’ve found,

Will name you a poet whose works are renown’d[2]

Chime in – we would love to know if you have any guesses for this acrostic enigma. Please feel free to comment in the form below. We had a similar riddle competition last year, and you can see the answers as well. Don’t forget to tune in next time for the answer.

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[1] Pg. 12, Julie Sloan Brannon, Who Reads Ulysses?: The Rhetoric of the Joyce Wars and the Common Reader (Psychology Press, 2003) https://bit.ly/2V0Uw9f.

[2] Taken from Pg. 160, “The Lady’s Magazine Or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex: Appropriated Solely to Their Use and Amusement.” Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, vol. 20, 1789.