What is more loved than precious life? And what's feared more than mortal strife? What have the poor that the rich require, and what do all contented men desire? What spends the miser that the spend-thrift saves, that all men carry past their graves?
What’s so funny about this? This is one of those classic riddles whose origin remains obscure. From the language, I’d guess it’s 150-200 years old, possibly more. But the concept goes back to ancient Greece, at least. It’s a great riddle, because it stretches the meaning of the word “nothing.” Which is also the answer to the riddle. “Nothing” belongs to the group of indefinite pronouns. We have to be careful here because those of you who are only hearing this and not reading it, cannot see the quotation marks around the word “nothing”. These marks signal that the reader is supposed to ignore the meaning of the word and just understand that we’re talking about the word itself. Without this understanding the previous sentence would mean th
