Talk:Twenty Questions

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"This can produce some odd technicalities, such as a wooden table being classified as a vegetable."

That doesn't make sense 66.75.49.213

A wooden table is made of 99% wood, which comes from a tree, which is a vegetable. Sneaky? Perhaps. Technically accurate? Yes. Calbaer 22:13, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps someone should gather the alternative names for Twenty Questions throughout the world. Alfréd Rényi noted the Hungarian "Barkochba game" in 1969, while Charles Dickens noted that the Victorian version was called "Yes and no." Calbaer 22:13, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

1) A tree is not a vegetable. Trees are perennial woody plants, and "vegetable" is not a botanical term. Ergo; insofar as "twenty questions" is concerned, a table made of carrots would be a "vegetable", but a table made of wood from an oak tree would not...at most, it could be "other", unless the term "vegetable" is used to describe anything that grows and is either alive or dead, which would seem to be stretching the limits of the definition. There are trees that can grow vegetables (such as the Moringa oleifera), but they are few and far between; and I doubt that furniture could be made from them.

2) I question the inclusion of the link to "One: the movie" in External Links. I have not seen the film; but there is no mention on the website or in the movie trailers of any connection to 20 questions. It would seem to be a film about the interconnectedness, or "Oneness" of all people. --Weirdoactor 17:10, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, but in this context, the Victorians used "vegetable" to refer to plant growths of any kind, not just carrots and peas... AnonMoos 02:15, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

I agree with AnonMoos. In games I've seen or played, everything falls under the major categories labeled "animal", "vegetable", "mineral", or "non-tangible" -- there is no "other" category.

A traditional question is "Was it ever alive?", which would be "yes" for our wooden table (since trees are alive), discriminating everything in the "animal" and "vegetable" groups from everything else in the "mineral" and "non-tangible" groups.

Since everything is forced to fit into those 4 categories, the traditional definitions must be stretched a lot.

While I agree with Weirdoactor that a wooden table is not usually considered a "vegetable", it fits even less well into the "animal", "mineral", or "non-tangible" categories. In a similar way, apples, mushrooms, maple syrup, cardboard boxes, and Yggdrasil all end up in the "vegetable" category. Mushrooms aren't even in the plant kingdom.

--68.0.120.35 20:14, 17 January 2007 (UTC)