Numbers

20 Questions

How It's Used

"Recently, after the harsh criticism from Mr. Hoekstra, intelligence officials have appeared at two closed committee briefings to answer questions from the chairman and other members. The briefings appear to have eased but not erased the concerns of Mr. Hoekstra and other lawmakers about whether the administration is sharing information on all of its intelligence operations...

"He added: 'The U.S. Congress simply should not have to play Twenty Questions to get the information that it deserves under our Constitution.'"

"When I was growing up, my family would sometimes play Twenty Questions on long car trips. My father was one of those people who insist that the standard categories of animal, vegetable, and mineral be supplemented with a fourth category: 'abstract.' Abstract could mean something like 'whatever it was that was going through my mind when we drove past the water tower fifty miles back.' That abstract category sounds absurdly difficult, but it wasn’t: it merely required that we ask a slightly different set of questions and grasp a slightly different set of conventions, and, after two or three rounds of practice, guessing the contents of someone’s mind fifty miles ago becomes as easy as guessing Winston Churchill."

Also Known As (AKA)

Twenty Questions

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