77

Those of us who have a Facebook account probably have lots of connections in it. Some are actually real, but then there are the rest of them -- the ones that use Wiktionary instead of real dictionaries and post "puzzles" like this... Ugh, do you have any suggestion on what I should do to keep this stuff from showing up in my news feed?

enter image description here

In case you want to check your work on the above, the answers are here.

Kevin
  • 1,273
  • 2
  • 11
  • 22
ffao
  • 21,733
  • 4
  • 68
  • 109
  • umm.. is it better to not reveal the answers and let users solve this puzzle? – athin Jan 22 '18 at 03:33
  • 17
    I think, having peeked at the answers, that "99.99%" might be more accurate... – puzzledPig Jan 22 '18 at 03:44
  • 53
    I was ready to downvote seeing the title... – Deusovi Jan 22 '18 at 06:31
  • 11
    The only question you're actually making is essentially "How do I make them stop?" -- the answer to that is simple; block people who send you crap like this. Warn them once or twice and then just get rid of them. – Clearer Jan 22 '18 at 14:12
  • 3
    Change the title to a question like "How to stop people from posting things like '90% of the people will fail this riddle'" and move it to the appropriate stackexchange site. This does not belong here! – Mayou36 Jan 22 '18 at 14:18
  • 3
    Uh, it might be a bit unclear, but I think the real question here is to answer the puzzle. (@Mayou36, @Clearer) – EKons Jan 22 '18 at 14:39
  • @ΈρικΚωνσταντόπουλος well then the question should be changed, shouldn't it? Question and title are contradicting. And anyway, such a title... come on! – Mayou36 Jan 22 '18 at 14:58
  • 10
    Poe's law in action :o – Ankoganit Jan 22 '18 at 15:50
  • 2
    Are you in the 90% if you didn't even try and just read the answer below? =) – jpmc26 Jan 23 '18 at 06:06
  • 6
    This puzzle is beautiful. Well done. – Tony Youngblood Jan 23 '18 at 23:27
  • 5
    Kind of hilarious how one of the best puzzles we've seen last week has people commenting that it doesn't belong here :P – votbear Jan 24 '18 at 06:36
  • "There are no squares, only rectangles." or "Does this include the squares like the one created by joining other squares?" Trolling is one way of having fun with these. – Emond Jan 24 '18 at 11:31

3 Answers3

64

The real trick to this puzzle is:

the suspiciously prominent languages in the answer key. One of the two answers not mentioned in either the "obvious" or "correct" solutions looks like a word in that language - but it doesn't mean what the English word means at all! For instance, "once" in the cell just above the lower left corner is a Spanish word, meaning "eleven". "Fabric", just after it, looks like "fabrika", a Serbian word meaning "factory".

To get the answer, we

look at the real meanings of each of those words, helpfully given by Wiktionary's list. (And we know to use Wiktionary because the flavortext says so!) The first letters of them spell DROP FALSE FRIENDS, which is what you should do!

Deusovi
  • 146,248
  • 16
  • 519
  • 609
  • 2
    You continue to live up to your username! – Phylyp Jan 22 '18 at 07:03
  • 1
    What about the cell in bottom left? It's the only one that doesnt mention any other languages in the cheatsheet :O (I assume you got E from pathetique being french for emotional, but it'd still be interesting to know if there are any hints pointing to that language) – votbear Jan 22 '18 at 09:06
  • Thanks, it's much cleaner now! @Votbear, those timeline puzzles are not exactly known for having good quality control... Fortunately I found a corrected answer sheet and updated the OP to point to that. – ffao Jan 22 '18 at 10:44
  • I'm sorry, but I don't quite follow your explanation. I thought I had it figured out, but I quickly got stuck. I found that "prick" is Swedish for "dot" and "sale" is Polish for "rooms", but when I got to the third square, I couldn't find any of "the", "modify", "become" or "transform" in the Wiktionary list. I couldn't find anything even close to any one of them in fact. What am I missing? – saulspatz Jan 22 '18 at 20:54
  • @saulspatz: Instead of searching through the list, I think you're meant to look up each of the words in their own article. – hmakholm left over Monica Jan 22 '18 at 22:33
  • 7
    And it's a pun, too, because "Words (especially from foreign languages) that look like they're related but aren't" ... are called false friends. – ConMan Jan 23 '18 at 05:30
  • I don't get the answer. For example, looking at the top left box, where is that " D " coming from? the letters are M,N,T, and Y, and the initials are p,w,p, and again p. – Federico Jan 23 '18 at 08:20
  • 1
    @Federico If you translate the words into Swedish (which is revealed in the answer key), you find that prick means dot. The d comes from the translation – b a Jan 23 '18 at 11:18
28

Oh, look, this is simple.

Welcome doesn't start with P, To is not commercial-related, The is not change-related, Great is roughly an antonym of the others, Beyond is not a carpet, I is not a rodent, Am is not a bird, Sorry is not reasonable-related, To is not a "number of times" indicator, Tell is not a fabric, You doesn't end in -ents, That is a short word and doesn't contain the vowel E (whereas the others only have the vowel E (discounting Y)), You doesn't end in -tic, Have is not fat-related, Passed is not a dessert, and On is not art.

The "obvious" set gives:

NOPE WRONG SET HERE

Man, I feel dumb! Time to check the answers.

TRY OTHER WORD SETS

Ok, let's do that instead.

YAY NOW FIND RESULT

Really? Well, there's one more option to try...

MISGUIDED LEXEMES

(After getting the first set of words, and "getting" the second set of words, the solution path was mainly "trying to massage out a message with 2 options per letter".)

phenomist
  • 13,602
  • 52
  • 70
  • 4
    Good start, but this still doesn't answer the question in the original post. – ffao Jan 22 '18 at 04:06
  • That's true, I thought it might be a bit more than that. One thing I thought, since the letters were already used up information, and the words are a little constrained, perhaps maybe we might want to look at the permutation order where the letters go. Unfortunately that didn't really yield any results. (EDIT^2: Oh, never mind, it's just alphabetized by the first extraction letter.) – phenomist Jan 22 '18 at 04:46
  • If you come up with a reasonable solution to a "trick" puzzle that isn't the answer the author is looking for, then that's a sign the problem is probably bad -- not your solution. – Chuu Jan 23 '18 at 23:04
  • 1
    Phenomist and Chuu, did you look at the "answers" linked in the original post? That link is actually part of the true puzzle, and you need the information it contains to get the true solution! – Kevin Jan 23 '18 at 23:22
  • I used it to get the other three sets (including the second one). – phenomist Jan 25 '18 at 03:06
13

I presume the answer is NOT what's given below, placing me in the 90% category (oh well, good company) :-)

The out of place words form the sentence:

Welcome to the great beyond. I am sorry to tell you that you have passed on.

They are identified by the indices which tell me I'm in the 90%:

NOPE WRONG SET HERE

Phylyp
  • 9,160
  • 2
  • 37
  • 62
  • 2
    Ah, having peeked at the answers link, I realize this is not a puzzle so much as a trick puzzle! Or not, based on the language tag! – Phylyp Jan 22 '18 at 03:51
  • 15
    In case anyone is curious, the first spoiler block is the first two sentences of the Konosuba light novel (and this information is not relevant to the puzzle) – ffao Jan 22 '18 at 04:08