Kilobyte70, you are not breaking any rules and no one will make you leave. We like people whose first language is not English. What a lot of us don’t like or dismiss as stupid are internet/texting abbreviations such as “u” for “you” or “r” for “are.” You will not be taken seriously if you use that kind of thing.
This is not personal. It’s the culture of this board. I guess it’s that we feel if it’s important enough to post, it’s important enough to take a little extra time so that we all can read it readily. I’m not talking about typographical errors, and some abbreviations are completely expected and accepted. Certainly you will not be mocked if it’s clear that English is not your first language - for the kind of error that not speaking the language fluently leads to. l33t-speak isn’t one of those kinds of errors.
I’m saying this, fully aware of the irony that I’m further contributing to the hijacking of this thread - If you’re going to be a force for change on the boards, may I humbly suggest that you advise those people hijacking threads to nitpick minor grammar errors and chastise offhand humorous references to IQs to mend their ways rather than their victims? Because those posters are, in my opinion, both much more obnoxious and a bigger destroyer of threads. And a slight laziness of writing from a poster is just not in the same league as mixed case 733T speak, and as pointed out, is often actually a case of ESL. And may I suggest to those nitpickers, at the risk of seeming like a junior mod, that rather than waste our time with your vitriol, that you link to a pit thread instead?
Hmm… in cases like this, are we sure that the OP got the exact wording of the riddle correct? In riddles, there’s usually some twist or trick involved. Or if someone comes up to you and says “I bet you I can tell you where you got your shoes.” (the answer being, you got them on your feet, a common attempt at tricking tourists out of money in New Orleans) doesn’t work when you state it like this “I bet I can tell you where you bought your shoes.” I don’t think that in riddles (usually) that an approach that is crunching out an answer (can’t they just draw pictures? Act it out, etc) is usually the way to go. You have to think of wording (puns, double-meanings like the cabin in the woods/airplane cabin) and logic. So, I think we need to try that direction.
OK, I think my second solution is the one the OP is looking for, but the wording of the riddle could have been better. The mute guy needs to speak to tell the blind man what happened.
If I may so, the sentence that spawned so much debate was this:
which as you can see has no form of the so called l33t speak. And if I may point to your original post:
Here you specifically stated that my ‘spelling, grammar and punctuation’ has to be flawless if I am to avoid discrimination in this board. I am sorry if I am further stretching this pointless exchange but I felt I had to correct you there.
If this is the answer though, the OP phrased the riddle wrongly and made it impossible for us to solve. He specifically contradicted this answer:
That specifically says there’s 3 people, and 3 wives. I suspect Kilobye’s friend actually said, ‘all of them are married to separate women, and all of them live together’, which wouldn’t rule out Lyanthya’s answer. This is the problem with relaying pedantic riddles like this 2nd hand - a slight mistake in the wording and the riddle is impossible to solve.
Could the blind man be able to see but have a job cleaning blinds? If he still has to have a disability it’s probably a learning disability - after all, he can’t read.
I’m not sure if this gets us closer, but it seems kind of riddlish to me.
The question arises - which riddle are we trying to solve? It can’t be the one in the OP, because we already have two or three perfectly satisfactory answers for that.
It seems to me that each time someone comes up with a satisfactory answer (= one that meets all of the given conditions), our polyglot friend with the impressive IQ waves it aside, says ‘not so’, and adds new terms and conditions specifically to invalidate the answer given. This is pointless. Let him define the riddle for which he seeks an answer, once and once only, and then we can address it.
Sorry, but a gerund usage is perfectly resonable in that case.
“I appreciate your helping me with my homework.”
“Helping” in that sentence is being used as a gerund (which is essentially a verb being used as a noun-- compare to a participle, which is a verb used as an adjective [eg The running man tripped.]), and refers to the act of helping.
In your sentence, you could say “Your desire for Icanhazchezborger is silly,” or “The fact that you want cheese is silly,” or leave it as you originally wrote it. However, “You wanting a cheeseburger is silly” is wrong.