How many legs does a horse have?

[meagain]

A random thought which you may find helpful in face-to-face meetings, apparently this riddle is very old, and has existed in various forms for over 200 years.

 

When I was a little nipper, on occasion I'd be taken to visit grandparents living in rural Worcestershire, in a sizable house, with a field behind the garden. One day, I went down to the field, and the nextdoor neighbour had just finished with the petrol mower in said field. He called me over to the fence, pointed at the horse in the next field and said "You see that horse?"

"Yes?"

"How many legs has it got?", he asked, in his broad Redditch accent.

"Four?", I replied in finest Swansea lilt.

"Right. Now, see that tail?"

"Yes?"

"What if I said that tail was a leg too? How many legs has it got now?"

"Uh, five?"

"No, silly! No matter what I tell you, a horse still only got four legs."

 

The moral of the story? Without anything to back it up, just saying something doesn't change anything in and of itself.

[Spiceskull]

Hmmmm...my first sig on the site was a version of that, for much the same reason as your moral suggests - what they say is irrelevant if it isn't true. I seem to remember the sig was 'you can call a horse a chicken, but that does not mean it can lay eggs...'

[krakan]

Or, I believe from White Men Can't Jump (and a previous sig of mine)

 

"You can put a cat in an oven, but that don't make it a biscuit."

 

Simply brilliant, I thought..

[meagain]

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