Extra Reading Diary: Nursery Rhymes

For the extra reading diary, I chose to do the Nursery Rhymes unit, mainly to see if I remembered them correctly.

The first section I really read in-depth was the Riddles section. There were a couple that stood out to me.

THOMAS A TATTAMUS took two T's,

To tie two tups to two tall trees,

To frighten the terrible Thomas a Tattamus!

Tell me how many T's there are in all that.

The answer is two (2 t's in "all that").

This one has a clever answer as well!

ELIZABETH, Elspeth, Betsy, and Bess,

They all went together to seek a bird's nest.

They found a bird's nest with five eggs in,

They all took one, and left four in.

These are all the same person, just called different names.

I also read through the Paradoxes section, and they were all pretty interesting. This one in particular stood out to me.

THE man in the wilderness asked me

How many strawberries grew in the sea.

I answered him as I thought good,

As many as red herrings grew in the wood.

This paradox was interesting because of the use of the red herring. It's a logical fallacy used in an argument to distract your opponent by bringing something up that's irrelevant to the discussion at hand. In this paradox, the red herring fallacy is exemplified by an actual red herring, which I thought was super interesting. Paradoxes are cool, man. 

Just one example of a pretty common paradox.