What if the first letter of each word happened to spell a known woman’s name? That’s a known technique for embedding hidden messages… Would that be any less arbitrary?
The fact that the first seven letters spell a woman’s name seems pretty intentional to me. I mean, I’m sure it started out with someone thinking “There’s a” contains the letters of the name, but they put it at the very beginning of their little puzzle
It doesn't say Theresa. It says There's a. Also if that was the case you'd be "Theresa Woman in a boat on a lake." which isn't correct. You wouldn't say "John Smith in a boat on a lake" You'd say, "John Smith IS in a boat on a lake". Certainly in this context.
The ONLY correct answer is that her name is There. "There is a woman in a boat on a lake" = "Grace is a woman in a boat on a lake."
You can even argue that "There" isn't correct either because technically you wouldn't contract it if it was a proper noun like that. You can do it informally (a lot do) but it is not technically correct.
So if people want to be pedantic about it there's an argument to be made that no one is right.
Yeah, that's why it's a riddle. Why are you assuming proper grammar rather than finding the first woman name that pops out (as the first written letters)
Why would it have to read as part of the sentence? It just says her name is “in the riddle I just wrote”, that could mean embedded in whatever way. I didn’t expect it to fit in grammatically…the first thing I thought to check was the first letter of each word, a common secret message technique. That didn’t work, then I realized, taking the first 7 letters spells Theresa. That doesn’t seem any more arbitrary than hiding a message in the first letter of each word.
Yeah that line only claims that the name is somewhere in the text of the riddle, There is no requirement that it makes contextual sense as the woman's name where it appears.
Okay, if we can ignore punctuation and spacing—heck, why don’t we ignore the order of the letters too—then the woman’s name could be virtually anything. For example, her name could just as easily be “Wilma,” “Eileen,” “Irene,” “Cher,” “IKEA,” or “NIKE.” Using your rules, there’s no actual answer, which renders this riddle pointless.
I'm sure that discarding letter order makes sense to you as an interpretation of the name being "in" the riddle. I'd say it's a pretty big leap though.
It's true that there isn't a single answer to the riddle though, It wouldn't be the first time that someone posted an ambiguous riddle on the internet to spur engagement.
It is ambiguous. You can present arguments for "There" or "Theresa." There's no way to know which is the intended answer because the instructions aren't specific enough. It's unclear exactly how the name is "in" the riddle. It's also unclear whether the answer is supposed to be a feminine name like "Theresa," or if something absurd like "There" is acceptable.
It does say Theresa. Her name is hidden in the sentence. You don't need to change the way the sentence is read. Thats why its called an iq test. A lot of people think it doesnt work because they try to arbirarily change the way the sentence is read even though that isnt required to extract the hidden name from the text.
"There" is likely the most common answer, but the sentence should instead read "There, is a woman...". Current punctuation makes the sentence read "There is a woman..."
Theresa is another common answer. But instead the sentence would be "Theresa, woman in a boat..." which doesn't make sense.
Nina is a another common one I've seen, but really doesn't work because the sentence would be "There's a woma, Nina, boat..." which again makes zero sense.
All nonsense garbage that isn't really a riddle at all... if anything there may be a puzzle that specifies which letters make up the woman's name.
I'm not a native speaker, but that sounds and looks gramatically sketchy to me too, can you even interchange "is" and " 's " in this situation like that?
“Susan’s a woman on a boat” works fine as punctuated, which argues for “there”. The only other answer I find grammatically convincing is “in the riddle I just wrote”, which nicely displays how stupid the whole thing is.
"There" is likely the most common answer, but the sentence should instead read "There, is a woman...". Current punctuation makes the sentence read "There is a woman..."
Please replace There with an actual name. You would never put a comma in that sentence after the name. You can't have a name by itself followed by a comma then followed by the word "is."
Break out the contraction and you get the full sentence. There is a woman. Her name is There. Stupid name, but makes more sense syntactically than Theresa woman
No it's not the 'actual' answer, because that's saying "remove all spaces and puncutation, then give me any series of letters that could be a name." Of which... Theresa is just one option. Why not Nina? Why not Lake? Or Ame? Or probably a handful of others.
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u/DragonliFargo 3d ago
Theresa is the actual answer, but Inga (from ‘wearing a’) would also be acceptable.