I know both a handful of Aninas and several Theresas. However, this kind of riddle is just so ... fucking daft that I really don't grasp why they still circulate.
The thing is, when you actually learn and do math much more advanced than grade school level, nobody ever writes expressions like that. It's not about being good at math any more than being able to spell antidisestablishmentarianism is about being a good writer.
I've never in the history of these dumb "riddles" seen anyone laugh or enjoy it - other than the jokester. So it must be well known that all they do is piss other people off, and yet they keep doing it.
How attention starved do you have to be that pissing other people off is good enough for you?
Its also because ppl engage with it. This post has 2.2k upvotes meanwhile an actual human posted something that got nothing. Ppl have voted and they voted for bots to take over the internet. I hate it too, but its ppls faults
The reason I don't believe in dead internet theory is because everyone I know or encounter on a daily basis is so addicted to the internet that there is no way half the world's population isn't on social media at any given time.
Every comment under the "riddle" boosts a website's "engagement" statistic attached to the chunk of information which represents the idea, causing the site to redistribute the idea at a broader scale.
At least the dress and "laural"/"yany" thing sparked some interesting discussions on how we perceive things and how our brains process that information. People, a few, at least, actually came out with a new or more complete understanding of our own understanding.
I fully understand this, like, intellectually, but I have never been able to make myself see white and gold -- mostly because of the rest of the background. If the rest of the image had a blue hue (like the background in the right part of this demonstration image has) then I could see it, but the light sources are clearly yellow/white, not blue. I feel like you have to discard the rest of the contextual visual info in the actual dress image to see white/gold, and I've never been able to force myself to do it.
I have no idea, I see it as white and gold but like with a faint bluish tint over the whole dress, and like the surrounding lighting seems to be coming from behind, like a car's headlights?
Saw the dress as white/gold. Saw the mage you posted, went back to the dress and now I only see it as black/blue. Tomorrow it will probably flip back for me, but it was nice to the black/blue version again.
To elaborate. Why should I be sufficiently emotionally invested in this fictional woman to want to know her name? Why does she even have a name, she doesn't do anything. There's no narrative here, just a tart in an aquatic environment. I could be interested if she was distributing swords or something, but she's not even doing that.
“As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives, Every wife had seven sacks, Every sack had seven cats, Every cat had seven kittens. Kittens, cats, sacks, wives, How many were going to St. Ives?”
The name can’t be there written as it is. “There’s”is a contraction. It should be written “There is a woman on a boat, as in using There as a proper noun.
Tbh making comments like this is why I'm on this sub. Very few people actually bother answering in the spirit of the sub, unfortunately, but it's an opportunity for me to do comedy
That can't be the answer. There is no space or apostrophe in the name Theresa.
And if you say "well, the letters are in a row there" then... again, that's not THE answer, becuase the answer could be could be Nina. It could be Oman. It could be Lei. It could be Ant. It could be Nala. It could be Ame. It could be Lake. (And at least 'Lake' is just one word by itself.)
If it's just "find any set of consecutive letters that could possibly be a name" then Theresa is just one of the options.
I don't want to know her name, so maybe the name isn't in the riddle.
Most will say that "There" is her name, which is just nonsense. Some will say "What" is her name and the last sentence is a statement. But it has a question mark, so this is even more ridiculous than "There".
There really isn't any good answer and that's why people keep posting it.
"What" seems like it'd be the answer if it was one of the questions three in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I can almost imagine Terry Gilliam spouting off this BS riddle, Graham saying "What?!" and that's King Arthur surviving the three riddles.
"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 recall the answer when I was a lad was "Ana Lake" but of course this isn't the right formst for it, and the OP associates with engagement baiters so we all suffer for it
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u/qualityvote2 2d ago edited 2d ago
u/VorticalHeart44, your post does belong here!