Question: Why is a raven like a writing desk?

anon answered on 22 Jun 2010:

The Mad Hatter’s Riddle…Did you know about my fondness for Lewis Carroll and his nonsense in particular? I found this on a website:

When he wrote the book, Carroll had no answer for the riddle either, nor did he intend there to be one. However, over subsequent years, so many people asked him the answer that in the preface to the 1896 edition he wrote:

“Enquiries have been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the Hatter’s Riddle can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz: ‘Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!’ This, however, is merely an afterthought; the riddle as originally invented, had no answer at all.”

(Note that he spells “nevar” as “raven” written backwards – a joke which overenthusiastic copy editors “corrected” in later editions.)

Carroll is not the only person to offer an answer after the fact, other solutions have also been given, the best known being, “because Poe wrote on both.” Other suggestions include, “because there is a ‘b’ in both and an ‘n’ in neither,” and “because they both have inky quills.”

http://wiki.answers.com

Personally, I don’t think we’ll ever know whether Carroll just enjoyed posing this kind of riddle to allow other people to create ingenius solutions or whether he actually had a particular answer in mind. Either way I think it was a smart strategy. Makes you wonder if there is an all-knowing/riddling Creator who has played the same trick on us with this Universe?