I’m looking at the replay now. This was the last category, and Ken just said “And, finally, we have ‘Fish Out of Water’.” He said nothing about a fish being needed in the response.
And, BTW, the DD was in that category: This is the Southernmost Major League Baseball Team. An incredibly easy DD, imo.
The guy who won a few games last week, Brian, made that mistake. He gave me the impression he was trying to show off that he new various noteworthy persons’ full names. He tried to respond with the composer Rossini’s full name, and Ken accepted it, but over the break the judges decided he mispronounced the first name and his credit was revoked. If he had just said “who is Rossini?” that wouldn’t have happpened.
Presidents are interesting cases, though. We discussed the Adamses in a previous thread when a contestant’s response of “who is Adams?” was accepted as corrrect without a “be more specific.” I could have sworn the same thing happened in the past couple years with a Johnson or a Bush too, when I suppose the judges thought it was obvious enough from context that there was only one it could have been.
Or Roosevelt/Harrison.
Bush is an especially interesting case, because if you mean the 41st president, these days you have to call him “George H.W. Bush,” even though no one called him that while he was in office. At that time no one worried about the fact that he had a son who was also named George, so just saying “George Bush” was sufficient.
The name “George H.W. Bush,” to use nerd-speak, is a retcon.
I’d just call one Bush fils and the other Bush pere but I can’t ever remember which word means which.
(Pardon my French.)
So one’s just the unindicted war criminal, the other is the not-so-bad one.
I follow the tradition established for William Pitt in England, and call them “Bush the Elder” and “Bush the Younger”. I don’t know if that would pass muster with the Jeopardy! judges, though.
“Pere” is father, “fils” is son.
Actually, I think they have accepted “Senior” and/or “Junior” before, even though that’s not actually accurate.
It’s accurate enough. “George HW Bush, Junior” would be wrong, but there’s nothing wrong about “George Bush, Junior”.
In NQAT (college quiz thingie) there is a special rule just for John Quincy Adams, namely that “Adams” will prompt a “be more specific,” but “John Adams” is immediately wrong.
I missed the beginning, why didn’t Ben return?
Brian
Googling finds he had an illness.
He will return in May
Brian
Ken said that he was unable to travel after returning home for the weekend.
I got today’s FJ, although it was admittedly a semi-educated guess.
I got it but had no confidence in my answer. Just couldn’t think of anything better.
“It’s a shame for a good Scotsman to admit it, but I’m not up on Milton.”
I won’t admit what I thought the answer was, but turns out the author was German. What do I know - I didn’t read that one either! 
I will; I figured it was from Hamlet.
I didn’t at first know who had won 53 Oscar nominations (!) but got the answer due to the clue “He was son of a percussionist-like all three contestants.
I wouldn’t have known it was that many, except our classical music station has a show that features movie soundtracks. He gets a lot of airtime.
He was just on Colbert last week, and I remembered his age from that, so the clue (born in 1932) lined up with the huge number of nominations.
My husband and I wondered if it was some piece of common knowledge that everyone had but us. But neither of us would have bet any money on such a category anyway.
I consider Mr 53 nominations to be the greatest composer of the 20th century. My wife rolls her eyes when I say things like that.
Compared to other soundtrack composers, his stuff is all different. I can spot an Alan Silvestri or James Horner soundtrack by the common motifs they use, but not this guy. And I like Horner and Silvestri!
I guessed “what is 1984” for the English literature one, but didn’t have much confidence in that.
I guessed “who is Williams”, but that number seemed awfully high. I assume he’s had several years with multiple nominations.
I also don’t know if just “Williams” would have been specific enough. All of the contestants gave his full name.