The podictionary word for today is riddle: In 1975 a guy named Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. He had been a controversial leader of the Teamster’s Union. I mention this only because his middle name was Riddle, which I found a little ironic given the mystery surrounding his disappearance. Another person named Riddle is the mythical character Tom Riddle in the Harry Potter series. He was the school aged Lord Voldemort, yet to become the ultimate evil force propelling the book series.

The reason I bring him up is that his name Riddle relates well to the etymology of the word and how he was introduced into the Harry Potter series. The word riddle is from Old English and we can trace it back at least 1000 years. Its meaning has remained pretty consistent throughout that whole time. It meant, and means—and here I quote the Oxford English Dictionary:
A question or statement intentionally worded in a dark or puzzling manner, and propounded in order that it may be guessed.

So the darkness implied there certainly applies to Voldemort, but by the mid 1600s a person could be referred to as a riddle if they were hard to predict or figure out. I’d guess that applies to Voldemort as well. But what really made me sit up and take notice was the fact that lexicographers associate the word riddle, somewhere in it’s deeper Germanic or Indo-European past, with the word read, as in “read a book.” In the Harry Potter story Ginny Weasely gets drawn into the dark side of magic through her reading of Tom Riddle’s diary. I talked about the word read yesterday and riddle’s roots go back to the same meaning of trying to fit something together. In the Old English riddle’s parent word also held a meaning of “counsel,” “opinion,” or “conjecture.” Those early Englishmen seemed to have loved riddles.

I say English men advisedly since a number of the ancient documents contain riddles that are certainly more along the lines of the jokes told in an all male environment. Here are a couple that are more than 1000 years old:

A curiosity hangs by the thigh of a man, under its master’s cloak. It is pierced through in the front; it is stiff and hard and it has a good standing-place. When the man pulls up his own robe above his knee, he means to poke with the head of his hanging thing that familiar hole of matching length which he has often filled before.

Now, you can get your mind out of the gutter, because what they’re talking about is a key. Here’s another:

I am a wondrous creature: to women a thing of joyful expectation, to close-lying companions serviceable. I harm no city-dweller excepting my slayer alone. My stem is erect and tall–I stand up in bed–and whiskery somewhere down below. Sometimes a countryman’s quite comely daughter will venture, bumptious girl, to get a grip on me. She assaults my red self and seizes my head and clenches me in a cramped place.

She will soon feel the effect of her encounter with me, this curl-locked woman who squeezes me. Her eye will be wet. “Again, you might be fantasizing there, but what you’re fantasizing about is in fact an onion. So the point about the word riddle is that its ancient meaning is not the confusing nature of a riddle, but the figuring out, the solution.”