In fairness, the clue wasn’t “Fill in the blank: A date which will live in ______?” It was “What one word replaced ‘world history?’” I can see someone trying to think of a one-word synonym for “world history” and thus getting off track.
But can anybody recite a portion of FDR’s speech other than the line that contains ‘infamy’? I thought the answer was extremely easy and I was shocked they all didn’t answer it correctly.
In FDR’s speech from Dec 8, 1941.
I live in Chicago [suburbs]. Here the local ABC outlet airs the new Jeopardy! episodes at 3:30 PM. As I’ve complained before, who do they imagine would be watching then? Fortunately, we have a DVR. Mrs Maven & I watch it during dinner.
They also air a rerun around 2:30 or 3:00 AM. Equally bizarrely, the grid on Comcast calls that show “Daytime Jeopardy.” I always refer to it as “Overnight Jeopardy.”
If the new episode is preempted
for weather, sports, or breaking news, they show that instead of the rerun. I used to have a permanent DVR event. Now I create a one-shot if the new episode is missing. Other cities should follow their good example.
And infamy rhymes.
With what? History?
Phoenix market has “Daytime Jeopardy!” at noon. Right now it is about a couple weeks back, with Mattea.
Regular J! is at 7:30, immediately after Wheel! Of! Fortune! The fun part of that is the times they have “International Wheel” and they end the show with little clips of, say, Hungary’s version. They are always so fascinating. A lot of foreign versions have live bands and dancing. OPA!
On Saturdays at 7:30 we get “old” Jeopardy (right after “old” WOF), usually from a season ago, but right now it is from January or February, with Jonathan Fisher and Mayim as the host.
Yes, yes it does.
Here in the Bay Area, Jeopardy! gets bumped from its regular time slot of 7:00 by sporting events from time to time, especially during the NBA playoffs.
When that happens, they show it at 10:30, the DVR finds it, and we watch it the next day. No biggie. I can’t think of a time they ever skipped an episode entirely.
Our Jeopardy! airs at 11:30 am Central time. I record it, and watch it sometime after work. WOF comes on at 6:30 pm, and we watch at dinnertime.
Not as embarrassing as thinking that Wayne’s World made Queen famous. 
Yeah, that was a real WTF moment. Kids these day, I swear.
Despite being a regular viewer, my interests don’t seem to line up with those of most Jeopardy contestants. My favorite categories are ones with some kind of “gimmick” like that, some theme beyond just the subject of the category, like having a letter or series of letters in quotation marks, wordplay, before & after, those sorts of things. Plus a few categories I’m strong in like science/math and classical music. But most contestants seem to shy away from those, and thus if any clues are left on the board at the end of the round, it’s those. I groan every time there’s a nice letters-in-quotation-marks, wordplay, or science category, yet the contestant picking first goes straight for “Famous French Women” or “18th Century Architecture.”
What speech? FDR presumably gave multiple speeches, and I don’t have them or their contents or exact dates memorized. The first thing that goes through my mind when I think “something FDR said” is “The only thing we have to fear is, fear itself.” And I never knew until googling that sentence just today that it is from his first inaugural address. If you had asked me, I would have guessed he was speaking in reference to World War II when he said it.
Now, I soon realized it wouldn’t have made sense for any of the words in that sentence to have replaced “world history,” so I started trying think of something else, focused on the date given, realized that was roughly around the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, and thought of the right quote. But that was easy in the comfort of my living room. Had I been under the lights on the Jeopardy stage, knowing I was on national TV, betting real money, I may very well have frozen up and not thought of it in time.
Perhaps my favorite Jeopardy clue ever was an audio in “Before & After”:
And they played a snippet of “Take the Skinheads Bowling”.
(Try as I might, can not find that clue on the Jeopardy Archive site.)
So who else included Stettin and Triest?
Um, the FJ question was 'In a draft of FDR’s speech of December 8, 1941, the words “world history” were changed to this one word."
Kinda narrows it down to one speech, doesn’t it?
I wonder if FDR was wrong and December 7, 1941 is not a date that has lived in infamy. Even among younger Americans I would think the date of the attack on Pearl Harbor would be well known. Perhaps not.
You used the phrase “FDR’s speech” as though a person would be familiar with that exact speech by the date, as though “FDR’s speech of December 8, 1941” had the same distinctiveness as, say, “The Gettysburg Address.” But to me, it doesn’t. How would I know that, for example, that wasn’t the speech in which he also said “the only thing we have to fear is, fear itself?” It’s like saying “can anybody recite a portion of Bill Clinton’s speech of January 26, 1998 other than the line that goes ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman?’” Well, sure, now I recognize that speech. But if you just said “Bill Clinton’s speech of January 26, 1998,” I’d have no idea what you were talking about.
For us older Americans, the speech by FDR that day is just something everyone knows. For example, if you were asked what George W. Bush talked about in his speech on the evening of September 11, 2001, I bet most of us could figure it out.
Sunday morning, December 7th, the Imperial Japanese forces attack our bases in Hawaii. The next day FDR addresses a joint session of Congress and asks them to declare that a state of war exists between our two countries.
I could definitely see that being a generational thing. I was probably daydreaming through the entire year that period of American history was covered in high school, so I’ve never made a deliberate effort to memorize any specific facts about World War II. Any knowledge I have of it comes from background cultural osmosis. I could have told you the Pearl Harbor attack happened in December, but not the exact date, and frankly if we weren’t having this discussion and you asked me the year out of the blue, I might just as well have guessed 1940 or 1942.