ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that many collections of European riddles have been arranged one way or another by recorded answers so that, even having found an abundance of sexual symbolism in their make-up, it is hard to ascertain its status there. Within Taylor's classification, riddles describing different species of fruit, apple, watermelon, and orange, as a house with many inhabitants fall into one class; but riddles describing a single fruit in different ways fall into different classes. An enigmatic living creature with an odd combination of members and attributes, heads and legs, moving and eating, unmistakably points to the field of sexual phenomena as they are presented in culture. Taylor"s nomenclature presents the very first means that the sight of a copulating couple or of a sexual act as such requires for partial, estranged, defamiliarized, euphemistic, and tongue-in-cheek depiction.
