For anyone unfamiliar with Cecil’s take on this one
From time to time a word question will come up on this board and someone will quote Evan Morris from his “Word Detective” website. Well, old Evan has finally gotten around to doing something Cecil did years ago. He produced his first book (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, copyright 2000).
Deep into the 14 page introduction Evan suddenly went into the following rant.
For anyone who has purchased Cecil’s books, read Cecil’s columns or followed Cecil on the old AOL board reading this felt DELICIOUSLY EVIL! This is three paragraphs. He went on a little longer but this pretty well represents his opinion. All Dopers should get a bit of glee from it.
Morris was writing about questions he gets in weekly mail…
Approximately one hundred of those questions are really one particular question, about perhaps the most obnoxious riddle ever invented: “There are three common words in the English language that end with gry. Angry is one and hungry is another. What is the third word? Everyone uses it every day and everyone knows what it means. If you have been listening, I have already told you what the word is.”
When I received this question for the first time about four years ago, I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out the answer and, after pounding my head against the wall for a week or two, did some serious research and arrived at the following realizations: first, we can all stop looking for that third gry word. There is no other “common English word” ending in gry, although there are a few obscure ones, such as aggry (a type of bead) and gry itself (meaning “a very small amount”).
Second, no word ending in gry was ever the proper answer to this insipid, annoying riddle. The wording of the riddle itself has been badly mangled as it was passed from person to person over the years, but the original form was evidently a trick question (as many riddles are) that used double-talk to send the listener off on a wild-goose chase looking for a third gry word. Depending on the form of the riddle, the proper answer may actually have been it, language, or some other tricky answer. No one knows for sure because the original form of the riddle has long since been lost in the mists of time, rendering the whole mess unsolvable. Trying to untangle the gry riddle today is right up there on the Pointlessness Scale with deconstructing the Sergeant Pepper album cover or assessing the structural dynamics of Donald Trump’s hairdo. No one knows, no one will ever know, so please get over it.
(edited to fix link)
[Edited by Arnold Winkelried on 11-28-2000 at 02:32 AM]