On Sat, 9 Apr 2005, Joshua Kronengold wrote: > Philip Hart writes: > >On Sat, 9 Apr 2005, Joshua Kronengold wrote: > >> Philip Hart writes: > >> >I thought "caduceus", the snake-twined staff or wand Hermes carries as he > >> >leads souls to Hades, but that seems rather obscure. > >> It would not be beyond me to make a riddle whose answer is "cadescus" > >> (or however one spells it), > >Why, I spelled it but two lines above. > > Yes. My memory disagrees with your spelling. However, my memory may > be wrong, and probably is. I spell reasonably well, and I've used the word in a poem, and I almost always look up hard words by pasting them into google, which in this case agreed with me. > >> but this is not that riddle. > >How do you know? I mean, maybe you think that, say, "mercury" is a > >better answer, but ... > > That's not the answer either (for similar reasons as a cadescus -- I > wouldn't use Hermes to refer to either his Roman analogue or his > regalia; it's a bit gauche. Obviosly, I'm referring to a cadescus in > my imagery, but it wouldn't be much of a riddle if that were the > answer). I meant "mercury" in the sense of "quicksilver", hence the lower-case "m", but ok, will ponder further. Maybe scalpel through the association with medicine.