A traditional African riddle asks: “How do you eat an elephant?” (Answer: one bite at a time.) This riddle is a good example of an answer being hidden in plain sight. Other “riddles” are not true riddles at all. For example, this traditional Yiddish riddle asks: “What hangs on a wall, is green, wet, and whistles?” The answer is “a herring” because you can hang a herring on a wall and paint a herring green. If the herring has been freshly painted, it is wet. The joke is that it really doesn’t whistle -- there’s intentionally no solution to this riddle.
