Riddles are bad

(note: this post uses <details> and <summary> tags. If you're viewing in a reader that doesn't support this, click here to open in a browser.) A riddle is like a puzzle, except it's purely for the benefit of the person telling the riddle. It's not designed to be fun to solve, or even particularly clever. The only satisfaction in a riddle is for the person telling it, because they already know the answer. This is because "solving a riddle" usually relies on making multiple leaps of logic and correct assumptions about different metaphors, and there's no way anyone guessing the answer to a riddle could be confident in their guess. Let's take the riddle of the sphinx as an example. This is how I always heard it: What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs at night?A human. When humans are babies (the "morning"), they "walk on 4 legs"; when they're adults ("noon") they walk on two legs, when they're old and presumably walk with a cane ("night"), they "walk on 3…