Proverbial Questions
| No. of Players: | 2+ |
| Type of Game: | spoken |
| What you need: | nothing |
Goal
To ask and answer questions using proverbs.
How to play
One player thinks of a proverb and asks a question which can be answered by that proverb. The first player to correctly answer gets to ask the question in the next round. The player who won the most rounds wins the game.
Example
| Archie: | How do great minds think? |
| Bethany: | Great minds think alike. What's better than sorry? |
| Carl: | Safe! Better safe than sorry... What's equivalent to money? |
| Doug: | Time is money. Something that doesn't pay? |
| Bethany: | Crime. It's better than aspirin or any other medicine. |
| Archie: | Laughter. If you eat these fruits daily, the doctor won't come knocking. |
| Carl: | Apples. Name one thing you definitely won't find growing in your maple tree. |
| Doug: | Money. How much is a picture worth? |
| Archie: | A thousand words. What's the common denominator to a flock of birds? |
| Carl: | Their feathers. What shouldn't you do with a book? |
| Bethany: | Judge it by its cover. What shouldn't you put too many of in the fire? |
| Carl: | Irons. The bold are more likely to get this than the timid. |
| Archie: | Fortune. What's the best policy? |
| Doug: | Honesty. If you start acting like a Roman, where are you? |
| Archie: | Rome. |
And so on.
Did you know?
The world's oldest surviving written text appears to be a set of proverbs. These Instructions of Shuruppak were engraved in cuneiform script on clay tablets and were given by the last king of Sumer to his son over 4,600 years ago.
Indeed they read like an older, wiser man imparting fatherly advice – and in two distinct directions. For instance, one is given practical warnings, like how not to locate a field on a road. But one is also given moral and philosophical advice, like how not to speak arrogantly to one's mother, how not to pass judgment when one drinks beer, and how "Fate is a wet bank; it can make one slip."
Did you know?
The historical origins of the question mark is (pardon the pun) a bit of a question mark.
One theory says that scholars in the Middle Ages would write the Latin word quaestio at the end of a sentence to show it was a question. Since this was rather cumbersome to write out each time, it was eventually abbreviated. First to qo, then to q on top of o, and finally into the "?" symbol we know today. This is much like how our own cursive signature, which we once perfected in third grade, eventually morphed into the squiggly lines we now use as adults. But alas, there is little evidence to back up this theory.
A competing theory, also unsubstantiated, argues that the curve of the question mark traces back to the ancient Egyptians. Since Egyptians were famed for their worship of cats, it makes sense they would have been inspired by the similar shape of an inquisitive cat's tail.
In the end, perhaps it's appropriate this question remains a mystery. What do you think?
