Paul Harvey essay provides a list of things he wished for his listeners.
The essay reproduced above has circulated on the Internet for several years prefaced with a statement indicating it is 'from Paul Harvey,' an attribution which is somewhat ambiguous - does it mean that the late radio commentatorwrote the essay, or that he popularized it? It's unclear which concept the original e-mailer was trying to communicate, so we'll answer both questions in preference to guessing what was in that person's mind.Paul Harvey didn't write this essay. The true author of the piece is Lee Pitts, and the nostalgic composition was published (under the title 'These Things I Wish') in his 1995 book People Who Live at the End of Dirt Roads and appeared in the 2000 Chicken Soup for the Golden Soul collection.However, Paul Harvey used material written by Lee Pitts in his daily news and commentary radio segments from time to time, and he did read this particular essay (crediting Pitts, of course) during his 6 September 1997 broadcast. The popularization of 'These Things I Wish' by Paul Harvey led to its publication as an illustrated book of its own in 2006:When Paul Harvey read Lee Pitts's essay 'These Things I Wish' on his nationally syndicated radio show, Paul Harvey News and Comment, listeners everywhere loved it, and it's become a classic that's been passed from parent to child, from friend to friend. Here, for the first time, Pitts's moving text is presented opposite beautiful illustrations in a book that is the perfect gift for parents and children of all ages.Many of the forwarded versions of Pitts' piece end with the following tacked-on riddle (also falsely attributed to Paul Harvey):When asked this riddle, 80% of kindergarten kids got the answer, compared to 17% of Stanford University seniors. What is greater than God, More evil than the devil, The poor have it, The rich need it, And if you eat it, you'll die? Send this to 10 people and then press shift and you will get the answer. P.S. You won't believe this, but this really does give you the answer!!!!The claims regarding '80% of kindergarten kids' and '17% of Stanford University seniors' are inserted merely to dress out the leg pull - no one went about testing the riddle on either of those two groups, let alone comparing one set of results against the other. Yet although the statistic is made up, it does have some underlying truth: Small children often have a much easier time working out such riddles, ones which require a literal approach to language, than adults do. As with most riddles, the answer to this one is mind-numbingly simple, yet many adults will not think of it because they recognize words to have myriads of meanings rather than one literal definition apiece, a linguistic awareness that is not fully developed in younger children.The answer is 'Nothing.' As in nothing is greater than God, nothing is more evil than the devil, the rich need nothing, the poor have nothing, and if you eat nothing, you will die. So yes, if you do forward the riddle to ten people, you will get the answer because (and we groan as we say this) nothing will happen.
nan