When I was rather young, and thought that I was the smartest child in the universe, my uncle bought me a book of brain teasers. I read it over and over and over again. I couldn't solve very many of the puzzles on my own -- and that bothered me -- but I figured that the next best thing would be to memorize all the answers so that I could be "smarter."
A long time has passed, and I only vaguely recollect most of the puzzles now. I remember that one of them began "A genius is standing on a bridge." I remember another that involved a monkey trying to get a banana that was a certain number of feet away, but the distance was described only in terms of fractions of the same distance. There were a bunch involving counting brothers and sisters in a family without using numbers, or pouring water into ill-designed jugs, or lining up matches to make shapes. There was a grammar lesson illustrated by the story of a child buying sunglasses. There were a lot of what would later be called lateral thinking puzzles, where you had to extrapolate a very specific weird situation from a set of even weirder phenomena.
Perhaps it's odd that one of the few puzzles that I continue to have memorized to this day is the one that serves as the title of this node. The form that was in my book used "John while James" rather than "Smith where Jones," and it used "a better effect on the teacher" rather than "the most votes," but the principle was the same: your job is to punctuate the sentence so that it makes sense grammatically.
(if you want to work it out for yourself, cut and paste the node title into Notepad or something)
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The answer goes something like this:
Smith, where Jones had had "had," had had "had had." "Had had" had had the most votes.
I was delighted by this puzzle as a kid. Even then I had a fascination with punctuation, and it was disturbingly easy for me to imagine the school assignment (or, in this node's case, politician's letter) which magically improved as soon as the perfect tense was shifted into the pluperfect. Even now, I take an odd pleasure from the hypnotic effect of "had" as a helping verb and a participle in the same sentence, vacillating between type and token.
Thanks to DTal for reminding me of the name of the book: it was called Games for the Superintelligent and it was published in 1976.
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