Riddle

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Dr. Goodword
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Riddle

Postby Dr. Goodword » Fri May 21, 2021 8:11 pm

• riddle •


Pronunciation: rid-êl • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun; verb

Meaning: 1. (Noun) An ingenious, witty expression requiring rational skills to interpret, a conundrum. 2. (Noun) Anything that is difficult to understand or explain. 3. (Verb1) To pose a riddle. 4. (Verb2) Permeate with a multitude of holes. 5. (Verb2) Permeate multiply, spread throughout with many. 6. (Verb2) Sift out, pass through a sieve in order to separate, i.e. grain from chaff.

Notes: Today we are having a sale: two words for the price of one—and a very reasonable price at that! These two words are only coincidental homophones. Both verbs behave like indigenous words; they use the participles, riddling and riddled, as adjectives, and both use the present participle as a noun. Both have identical personal nouns, riddler.

In Play: According to Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Britain during World War II: "Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." This sense is basically nominal. The second Good Word is fundamentally a verb: "The machine gun riddled the room with bullet holes." Though you will more likely hear it in its figurative sense: "The new law is riddled with loopholes."

Word History: Today's first Good Word is an authentic English noun that comes from Proto-Germanic redaz-, passed down from PIE redh- "to count, reckon, reason". The ending is Old English noun suffix -els, found also in Dutch raadsel and German Rätsel "riddle".

The verb riddle is a verbalization of Old English hriddel "sieve, sifter". The initial H simply faded away. It was based on Proto-Germanic hridra- "sieve, sifter", inherited from PIE krei- "to sieve, sift, discriminate", source also of Latin cribrum "sieve, riddle" and Greek krinein "to separate, distinguish, decide". We also see it in Latin discrimen "distinction", which underlies the English borrowing discriminate. (Today's Good Word was the idea of our old friend and wordmaster, George Kovac of Miami, Florida.)
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George Kovac
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Re: Riddle

Postby George Kovac » Mon May 24, 2021 1:21 pm

Thank you for that fascinating etymology, Dr. Goodword. You solved the mystery of “riddle”: it is two unrelated words that morphed to share a common spelling and pronunciation. In biology, early observers sometimes mistakenly think two species are related because they look similar, only to later discover that appearances can be coincidental. Dr. Goodword explained that the two "riddles" do not share the same linguistic DNA.

Usually the etymologies covered in the alpha agora reveal that two apparently unrelated modern words actually descend from a common source, as is the case, for example, with “sphinx” and “sphincter.” The mystery of the relation between those two disparate words was discussed in this forum way back in 2007.

My first clue that there was some linguistic mischief afoot with the word “riddle” came during a winery tour in which I learned of “riddling,” a step in the production of champagne-style wines. The bottles are stored at a steep angle and periodically “riddled” (rotated) to allow gravity to draw the sediment into the neck. The sediments are later disgorged from the bottle before the final corking.

Yes, language and wine are riddled with mysteries and delights.
"Every battle of ideas is fought on the terrain of language." Zia Haider Rahman, New York Times 4/8/2016

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Re: Riddle

Postby Dr. Goodword » Mon May 24, 2021 7:35 pm

There are several specialized uses of the verb riddle which I omitted in my presentation, but I don't think I came across this one related to wine production.
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George Kovac
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Re: Riddle

Postby George Kovac » Mon May 24, 2021 8:54 pm

Here’s a link to the technique of riddling in the production of champagne:

https://www.champagne.fr/en/from-vine-t ... g/riddling
"Every battle of ideas is fought on the terrain of language." Zia Haider Rahman, New York Times 4/8/2016

David Myer
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Re: Riddle

Postby David Myer » Tue May 25, 2021 1:00 am

And here is another specialist use, a coal riddler: https://www.meisterdrucke.uk/fine-art-p ... 1860-.html.

David


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