A few weeks back, I found this on a whiteboard at work:

Wednesday, Tom and Joe went to a restaurant and ate dinner. When they were done they paid for the food and left. But Tom and Joe didn’t pay for the food. Who did?

I never did figure this out. The following week, I found that someone had written the answer on the board: Wednesday.

I looked over the riddle again and realized that that I’d assumed that “Wednesday, Tom and Joe went to a restaurant and ate dinner” meant “On Wednesday, two people named Tom and Joe went to a restaurant and ate dinner.” instead of “Three people who were named Wednesday, Tom and Joe went to a restaurant and ate dinner.”

I realized that the confusion would have been avoided if the writer had used an Oxford comma. The Oxford comma is the comma used before the very last item in a list and also before”and” and “or”. A list with an Oxford comma would look like “Tom, Dick, and Harry” instead of “Tom, Dick and Harry”. The Oxford comma is often considered to be optional.

My thought is that if the riddle had started with “Wednesday, Tom, and Joe went to a restaurant and ate dinner” then fewer folks would have been confused.

Either way, I don’t know why you’d name someone after hump day.

If anyone cares, I found a source for the riddle at https://riddles.tips/riddle-185