My sadistic girlfriend gave to me for Christmas, The Mensa Puzzle Calendar. It has one brain teasing puzzle for every day of the year. That is three hundred and sixty five chances to feel stupid.
A recent puzzle, titled Language Barrier, asked this:
Remove one letter from each word below the rearrange the remaining letters to form the name of a language.
1. pliant
2. wheels
3. hiding
4. whereby
5. helpings
6. sideshow
The calendar is at work and sometimes I have an opportunity to work the puzzles and sometimes I just casually look at them. That day, a Friday was the latter.
Number 2 just popped out at me…Welsh. I was not seeing anything in the others. These puzzles are ALWAYS like duh, “why did I not see that.” I looked at the puzzle a few times during the day, but did not spend a lot of time on it.
The next day was Saturday. I woke up early that morning, around 3 a.m. The words pliant, wheels, hiding, whereby were in my visual brain. I looked a second at this internal listing, and then I thought, “Latin, Welsh, Hindi, and Hebrew.” I laid there a while trying to remember the last two words on the list, and I could not. I went back to sleep.
In the morning I looked at the puzzle which I had brought with me to share with my sadistic girlfriend. Number 5 immediately feel into place as English, but number 6 was not there. I thought about it a few times during they day, and still nada.
Sunday morning, just about at 3 a.m. again, I woke thinking , “of course, Swedish for sideshow.”
The mind, at least mine, is a strange place.
If I made you feel superior because you looked at the list and knew the answers right away, my work here today is done. I’m going home.