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You swim in my sea
But don't appreciate me
Until I win races
Or make laughing faces,
I make a great head
Though I run from the dead.
I'm cool, you gotta admit
But don't call me chicken [poop]!

Catija
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Errorum
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  • Based on the -4, I'm guessing a lot of people are offended, though I'm not sure why. This is definitely not and not intended to be offensive. – Errorum Jun 07 '17 at 21:11
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    Why is this offensive then? Please explain. I was so proud of myself for this one, sad to see it go down in flames :( – Errorum Jun 07 '17 at 21:18
  • It may indeed be quite clever, but I'm afraid you've rather misjudged your audience. Many of us take in puzzles at work and find such language to be at odds with our work's browsing policy. Not to mention teenagers. – Forklift Jun 07 '17 at 21:22
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    Hey. The way you've worded this, specifically the parts about 'swimming in my sea' and 'give great head', is leading some people to suspect that the answer is sexual in nature. If you could find a way to reword it so that it doesn't give the same impression, that would be good. Thanks. – Mithical Jun 07 '17 at 21:27
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    In an attempt to help rescue this riddle, I've made an edit suggestion that does a couple of things - it removes the main innuendo but still gives a slightly obtuse meaning and it also fixes the poem rhyme scheme to keep the strong AABBCCDD format started in the first four lines... which gives the last line the strong drive towards the final rhyme word without it being written in the question itself. Please excuse my forwardness but feel free to revert the edit if you would rather retain the original version. – Catija Jun 07 '17 at 22:47
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    I'm surprised that @Mithrandir and BG of all people have such dirty minds. I've read all revisions of this riddle and couldn't see anything remotely sexually suggestive. Try pulling your heads out of the gutter some time. Also, there have been plenty of riddles here which have a dirty or sexual surface reading but are in fact perfectly legit; even if this did look sexual, we should be used to it by now and able to give a newish user the benefit of the doubt. – Rand al'Thor Jun 08 '17 at 10:57

1 Answers1

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Welp, seeing as this was downvoted to oblivion, and likely won't be answered. Here's the answer:

I'm:

Nitrogen

The title

Both words start with En, N is Nitrogen's chemical symbol

You swim in my sea

The atmosphere can be thought of as a sea of air, 72% Nitrogen

But don't appreciate me

Humans actually don't need to breathe Nitrogen as much as Oxygen

Until I win races

Used in race cars for boost

Or bring laughing faces

Nitrogen is used as laughing gas

I make a great head,

Nitogen beers have a lot of head compared to carbon beers

Though I run from the dead,

Decomposing corspes release nitrogen

I'm cool, you gotta admit

Liquid Nitrogen is very cold at -321 F (-196 C)

But don't call me chicken [poop]!

Chicken manure has loads of Nitrogen

Sorry everyone was so offended by my nerdy chemistry riddle

Catija
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Errorum
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    Well it was quite clever. With a little rewording of the riddle. I think it could still perform nicely. – Forklift Jun 07 '17 at 21:47
  • I think this was safe to self answer as many people took this in a different direction. The answer makes more sense now, but from the word choice it came across as being some sort of sexual or sexist answer. Rewording may remove some of the downvotes, but anyway good luck making more puzzles. – n_plum Jun 07 '17 at 21:47
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    I guess the minds of Puzzling are just dirtier than mine, lolz. – Errorum Jun 07 '17 at 21:48
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    @Errorum You are not going to persuade us that "I give great head" wasn't intended to sound sexual. (I take it the actual point was to make something that sounds very naughty and turns out to have a perfectly innocent answer. Which means that removing the naughtiness would remove much of the point of the puzzle. Tricky. But the site's policy is pretty clear; see e.g. this: https://puzzling.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5183/whats-our-policy-towards-potentially-offensive-posts – Gareth McCaughan Jun 07 '17 at 22:20
  • I think your riddle is nice... though the last four lines are a bit rough. You have an AABB rhyme scheme at the beginning and then switch to CDCD, which is really confusing. If you make a couple of adjustments to the last four lines you can get more meaning in your couplets and remove a tiny bit of the innuendo. – Catija Jun 07 '17 at 22:26
  • @GarethMcCaughan a quote from that page is: "it's not just the word or the idea of sex, we should consider the context and whether it's something of value". I think that line provides great value in that it's a solid clue that rhymes. Another quote: ""policy" isn't the right way of thinking about it. " I'd argue based on your link that the policy isn't that clear. – Errorum Jun 08 '17 at 00:12
  • @Catija Thanks for the edit. I really didn't know the community had such stringent standards. Although I appreciate that you like rhyming consistency, the last 2 lines don't flow as well syllabically the way you have it, and I think AABBCDCD is a perfectly valid rhyming scheme (many songs/poems use it). But whatever, I'm just gonna cut my losses with this one. Thanks again. – Errorum Jun 08 '17 at 00:22
  • @Errorum One person on that page thinks "policy" is the wrong way of looking at it. I guess on the grounds that we should think about it case by case rather than having strict rules and following them mindlessly. I agree with that, but personally wouldn't say it means we don't have a policy. And we do have a policy, in so many words. "Avoid vulgar terms and anything sexually suggestive." I personally am almost impossible to offend and I thought your riddle was funny, but I think Catija's edits make it better for this site. – Gareth McCaughan Jun 08 '17 at 00:27
  • I'm not quite sure how you were reading the last two lines, specifically, but I couldn't discern a reasonable meter even after trying five times. Plus, my version makes all of the lines part of the puzzle. – Catija Jun 08 '17 at 00:29
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    @Gareth "You are not going to persuade us that "I give great head" wasn't intended to sound sexual" - honestly, I'm disappointed in you. Just because you have a dirty mind and know some particular phrase of sexual innuendo, doesn't mean everyone does. Are you sure the OP is a native English speaker, for example? Even if they are, that doesn't require them to know all these phrases which supposedly have sexual meaning. I've read all revisions of the riddle and didn't pick up any sexual connotations from anything. Some of you need to get your minds out of the Freudian gutter :-) – Rand al'Thor Jun 08 '17 at 11:03
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    @Gareth Also, as a mod, you of all people shouldn't be guilty of this. In the meta post you've linked to, the community consensus (as indicated by votes) is that sexually suggestive puzzles can be fine, provided they add value to the site (as this one does). If you'd been around on this site a bit longer, you'd know that there's also well-established precedent: e.g. one, two, three. – Rand al'Thor Jun 08 '17 at 11:09
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    Those examples are different from this one; they are suggestive, this is (was, before Catija's edit) explicit. I stand by my statement about the phrase "give great head" and conjecture -- though I am not going to check while at work -- that if you put that phrase into Google you will not find more than one result in the first twenty that has a non-sexual meaning, unless some sort of safe-search censorship is at work. Incidentally, I do not believe you can really be unaware of the difference between innocence and ignorance; knowing what a phrase means is not the same as having a dirty mind. – Gareth McCaughan Jun 08 '17 at 12:37
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    @Gareth How can you say this riddle is/was explicit when it says literally nothing about sex and its OP couldn't understand where people were seeing anything offensive? You could maybe argue that it's suggestive, if you happen to be well-versed in sexual slang; to someone who isn't, there's nothing in the words "give great head" which make it more likely to mean something sexual than something to do with the Hydra of Lerna or foamy beer. – Rand al'Thor Jun 08 '17 at 12:47
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    I decline to believe that the OP genuinely couldn't understand where people were seeing anything offensive. (Saying "I don't see why people are getting offended" is perfectly compatible with actually understanding well what they objected to.) I am not sure what you mean by "nothing in the words ..."; if you mean nothing in each individual word then language doesn't work that way; if you mean nothing in the phrase as a whole then I repeat my suggestion to do the obvious search-engine test. – Gareth McCaughan Jun 08 '17 at 13:08
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    Ah, I found a way to do it safely despite being at work. Result: no non-sexual meanings in the first 40 hits. One referring to hydras at #45 (no others in 41-50), except that the point of that one is clearly to be a pun on the sexual meaning. I didn't look further than the fifth page of search results. The sexual meaning is what that phrase means, like it or not. – Gareth McCaughan Jun 08 '17 at 13:14
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    @randal'thor I agree with Gareth on this, regardless of the OPs intent, and regardless of things like non-native English speakers, what that phrase means and what it is often associated with are sexual in nature. As we've explained before someone removed comments; some may take this in that direction. Telling us to "take our minds out of the gutter" doesn't change anything. Just because some people didn't see it that way, some did. And considering someone as young as BG found it inappropriate/offensive are a clear indication that the word choice was not appropriate for this site. – n_plum Jun 08 '17 at 16:18
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    @randal'thor Thanks for sticking up for me! I was considering quitting this community after this post, but I'm glad to see at least some people have a sense of humor. Further, the age for this site is 13. I assume that means we can make PG-13 posts. Phrases like chicken, bull, or give head are all frequently found in PG-13 movies. I am a native English speaker, I do know what those phrases mean, and I don't think they're inappropriate for this site, especially looking at the examples posted above. – Errorum Jun 08 '17 at 17:20