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Dr. Shapiro's Puzzle of the Day

Today's Puzzle

Monday, September 21
In the mists beyond the Pacific lies a city variously known as Cisco or San Anc—both names are controversial—where they speak a dialect of English curious to our ears. The people of that city live in miniums, work out at the nasium, and fill their mobiles with oline (when they aren't getting around by omni or usine). And just in case you didn't get the randum, they even have a school for kids who love ematics.

How would the people of Cisco use the following words in a sentence? (One sentence per word, or you can cram them all into one sentence should it please you.)

   1. catessen          2. nnaise          3. ceros          4. anzee          5. inenza          6. edo

Bonus round: What word means skillful rhetoric to us, but a place for science to the Ciscans?

   


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Yesterday's Puzzle + Solution

One of my recent puzzles alluded to the five senses. But we actually have many more senses than those: our senses of time and temperature, for instance.

My one-year-old daughter and I have a game: she'll be in her high chair or in her mother's arms, and I'll lunge as if to gobble up her feet, with suitably monstery toothgnashing noises (as one does); she'll laugh and squeal and pull her feet in as far as she can retract them. These days, I only need to dart a significant glance toward her feet and the game is on. Her response shows that she has a well-developed sense of proprioception—the awareness of what?

A little baby laughter to brighten your morning

Solution Charlie said it better than I could:
This is one of my favorite senses! It's the sense of where oneself is in relation to oneself—that is, the spatial relationship within one's body. If I ask you to touch your nose with your eyes closed, that's the proprioceptive system at work!
Good job to those of you who did some linguistic sleuthing and realized that proprioception is related to words like proprietor and property.

Congratulations to yesterday's solvers Charlie, Maddy, Inca, Connor, Yana, Jacob C., Dr. Yetman, and Zachary S. Thanks to everybody who made a guess!

About This Site

Though he now teaches mathematics, Dr. (né Mr.) Shapiro's first job in a K–12 school was as a lunch monitor in Davis, CA. It was there that he originated the Puzzle of the Day, even rewarding correct answers with tickets in denominations like "15 points" (though without a clear idea of how he'd ultimately redeem these). Dr. Shapiro's favorite puzzle from this pre-professional era was "Tell me the location of the beehive on this campus."

Ten years later, Dr. Shapiro revived Puzzle of the Day at Proof School, writing each day's puzzle on a name tag. After 600 puzzles or so, he was just starting to feel normal about students reading his chest all the time when campus closed and the puzzle, like the rest of our lives, moved online. New puzzles are posted daily on school days.

Want to catch up on old PotDs? There's an archive currently containing puzzles from March to June 2020.