# Cease your mourning, here's another riddle for you

Fishy to begin with,
A little unreasonably rounded off.
Six faces in the middle,
But needs to be closed a million times.

Stumped by this riddle?
Then get off your computer and go live a little!

This riddle has intentionally been made very cryptic, but there are more than enough clues to find the answer.

The advice given in the riddle is:

Carpe Diem!

which is

Latin for "Seize the day".

The phrase was coined by Horace, although the concept is older, for example when Gilgamesh is told him to forgo the mourning for his friend Enkidu and embrace life. The riddle's title alludes to this. Today, the phrase has a broader meaning and is often used to just mean go live a little as qwr points out in the comments. The last two lines of the riddle refer to the phrase's modern meaning.

That phrase is made up of:

carp: something fishy, a fish
e: an irrational or "unreasonable" constant (big thanks to Jon Gordon for this one!)
die: a six-sided thing to roll
m: the abbreviation of one million

I haven't got a good explanation for the second line.

• I think this is correct. Maybe e is a little rounded letter? – qwr Jul 4 '15 at 21:25
• "e" is the last letter of "a little" - maybe it's unreasonable to round off all but the last letter? – Rand al'Thor Jul 4 '15 at 21:44
• m oehm you're a badass – JLee Jul 4 '15 at 22:29
• Fantastic. For the second clue, what's a synonym for unreasonable? And can you pick out the clues in the title and the last line? – CodeNewbie Jul 4 '15 at 22:31
• Carpe Diem is "go live a little". Diem means day, or "mourning" – qwr Jul 4 '15 at 22:58

I think it's something like

INCUBATE.

Fishy to begin with,
A little unreasonably rounded off.

Fishes have fins; the word FIN rounded off becomes IN. This rounding off is 'unreasonable' because it's unreasonable to expect solvers to find it without even the right first letter!

Six faces in the middle,

A solid with six faces is a CUBE, which we find in the middle of the word.

But needs to be closed a million times.

The final part of the word is ATE. In all the meals you ate in your life, your mouth must have needed to be closed at least a million times!

Stumped by this riddle?
Then get off your computer and go live a little!

Thanks for the advice - I'll go and do that right now ;-)

• +1, Nice attempt. But apart from the deduction of CUBE, everything is quite a stretch. Hint: It's not CUBE that you get from that line. – CodeNewbie Jul 4 '15 at 18:10
• @CodeNewbie How about HEX then? I looked for words with HEX in the middle, but couldn't find anything that seemed to match the rest... – Rand al'Thor Jul 4 '15 at 18:17
• Not HEX. I'm not going to give you any hints regarding it, because it's almost all there. Anything more will just give it away. – CodeNewbie Jul 4 '15 at 18:51
• @CodeNewbie Just saw one of your recent answers. I think I now know what the 'six faces' bit means ;-) – Rand al'Thor Jul 4 '15 at 19:25

I cannot comment as I have insufficient reputation but...

e is a mathematical constant - an irrational number, in fact. And because it's irrational, we use an approximation - rounded off.

This explains the second line?

• Very good! I hadn't seen the connection between "unreasonable" and "irrational". – M Oehm Jul 5 '15 at 13:20