The Handbook of Conundrums

A conundrum is a riddle in the form of a question, the answer to which involves a pun. Originally the term was applied to any quaint expression. It is thus, in its modern form, a union of the elaborated riddle and the impromptu pun. With the earliest development of intelligence came the discovery of likeness and difference in things, and the search for analogy was carried out along both sensible and absurd lines, the latter drifting into a double analogy of thought and form, of which the conundrum is the logical product.