Swimming and swimmin’ are two different words; I might pronounce them slightly differently when reading them. I think it likely the lady said the second form deliberately, thinking that was the word in the song’s lyrics and ignoring the G staring her in the face.
Despite that, they should have treated her dropped-NG as a minor accent deviation and given her the win anyway. Or done something different: Ask her to repeat her answer. Or award both contestants the prize money.
This is demonstrably false, as evidenced by the tens of millions of native English speakers who do pronounce them that way. In her variety of English, pronouncing “swimming” as “swimmin’” is “correct”, “proper”, “clear”, and all the other things people here are claiming it isn’t.
If Wheel of Fortune’s rules state only that words must be pronounced “clearly” and “correctly”, then the woman was effectively robbed. In the unlikely event that the rules actually define “correct” with reference to a particular variety of English, then I suppose the show was in the right to deny her the win.
They do this often on “Jeopardy!” in the event someone mumbles or stumbles over a word. They should do that on “Wheel,” too.
As things stand, however, I can see the point of not accepting “swimmin’,” since the game hinges on getting each individual letter correct. If I were playing, I’d take special care to e-NUN-ci-ate my answer clearly and fully.
In my dialect, the difference is more apparent in the vowel that precedes them. When I say these words to myself the “i” is a [ɪ], but starts edging towards * in “swimming.” (For those that don’t read IPA, I’m going to try to explain this, it’s like my “short i” starts getting close to a “long i” type of sound. So, instead of “swimming” it sounds a little closer to “swimmeeng,” but it’s a clipped “long i,” so not quite [i:] in IPA.) I definitely could feel it slightly higher up in the throat. I can pronounce it with an [ɪ] when I’m very carefully enunciating, but it’s not natural.
That said, it sounds to me like she is saying [ɪ], with a soft [ŋ] in there. Remember, as I said above, the “g” in the “ng” combination is not pronounced exactly the same as it is in a word like “good.” The “regular g” is pronounced as a stop. “Ng” is not.
Sometimes I wonder if the contestants pronounce the final S on certain plural words. I’ve never seen one not accepted for the lack of the final S. Seems to me that since a lot of people drop the G in -ING words, she should have gotten it. One wonders if Sarah Palin would be capable of getting any answer accepted.
Except they aren’t. They’re the same word, pronounced by two different accents. Even in written language, they’re the same word; it’s just that with the latter, the writer wants you to hear the way the character would have pronounced it.
God forbid they have a puzzle with “Wednesday” in it.
OK, just for fun I recorded an MP3 with the pronunciations as follows, so people know what the hell I’m talking about.
I have a nasal speaking voice so please forgive. Anyhow, I say each word twice.
[swɪmɪn] - “swimmin’”
[swɪmɪŋ] - “swimming” (standard American pronunciation, with velar n)
[swɪmɪŋg] - “swimming” (velar n, and extraneous velar stop, aka a “g” sound. This is an over-enunciation.)
[swɪmɪng] - “swimming” (pronounced with an alveolar nasal and a velar stop)
I then say them in adverbial form, “swimmin’ly” and “swimmingly” with three variations in the same order as above.
To my ear she said swimmin’
Probably the best thing would have been to ask her to repeat it though
There was an instance on NZ Wheel of fortune where the answer was Cosby, Stills and Nash
All the consonants were out, but not the vowels (so it looked like C_sby, St_lls and N_ash)
The Australian contestant said something that sounded to Kiwi ears like Cosby Steels and Nash.
There was a lot of controversy about it…
Heh 
I pronounce it the way it is spelled sometimes just to be a contrarian smart ass.
I would imagine, as it’s “Crosby, Stills, and Nash.” Although I am getting a chuckle imagining Bill Cosby in a folk rock supergroup.
BTW, it appears I screwed up my previous link with the pronunciations. Try this.
nm
Here is another notorious incident where the contestants try to pronounce “buttinsky.” I have no idea what pronunciation the producer was looking for. The guy on the left says it correctly at 2:08, they go through the panel and come back to him and he says it again and the second time they seem to take it. The first guy then starts to tell Pat that he said it the first time, but Pat just pats him on the back and tells him to stop.
I can’t find any examples, but one season they tried out a new category called “foreign phrases.” It was an unmitigated disaster. They were really simple phrases like “bonjour” or “hotel concierge.” (I don’t know if these specific phrases were ever used, but they were on this level of difficulty.) Most of the time, the contestants would just call random letters until all the blanks were filled in. Then they would try to sound out how to pronounce the word in English. Pat would just stammer and turn to the producer and then the producer would tell Pat to accept the mangled pronunciation. I think the producer realized they were in trouble because clearly none of the contestants had the faintest idea what these phrases were supposed to be.
I agree that it’s a correct pronunciation (that’s how I pronounce it), but what they were looking for is the syllable division and a slight accent difference. He says something like “buh-TIN-skee.” They were looking for “butt-IN-skee.” It’s a subtle difference.
If you Google “buttinsky” you can get a link to the audio pronunciation. That sounds like what the guy says at 2:08, and that’s that’s the way I say it.
But they were looking for the pronunciation that can be found on dictionary.com.
I see what you’re saying, thanks for looking up the links.
That has to be incredibly frustrating for the contestants.
Yeah, with the left guy’s pronunciation at 2:08, it sounds more like a Slavic name, and you can’t quite hear the root “butt-in” as clearly as with the “accepted” pronunciation. Now that I say it to myself, I’m not sure if I always use the first pronunciation or if I also use the second.
There also seems to be a second pronunciation difference: the “t” in the two words is slightly different, at least to my ears. In the first pronunciation, it’s clearly a standard English “t,” but in the second, it sounds like an alveolar flap. You know how Americans are sometimes described as saying “water” as “wadder”? That’s what I’m talking about. It almost like “bud-in-skee.”
No. As I said, if I were singing the songs with written lyrics(*), I’d pronounce them as written – swimmin’ without the ‘ng.’ I’ll guess many others would also.
(* - Or perhaps even without written lyrics if, like the unfortunate contestant, I thought the swimmin’ form was the standard form in the song.)
ETA: There is hair-splitting involved. In I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more, is gonna the same word as “going to” ?
I’d have given it to her. It was much closer than my guess of “semen swans a swimming.”
Here’s CNN.com’s Marquee entertainment blog on the controversy: http://marquee.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/24/wheel-of-fortune-pronunciation-gaffe-costs-contestant-angers-fans/?iref=obnetwork