My first thought was “Polynesia” but I knew that didn’t fit and got the correct answer soon after.
Brian
It seems Megan figured where Rob (the leader) would land after a miss and bet just enough to pass that figure with a get of her own. But she left herself vulnerable to a small bet by Jenny. If Megan realized she had to get it right to have any chance to win, she should have bet it all, to put herself in the best possible position if she does get it right. Instead, she threw away over $8000 for no good reason at all.
If you figured out the correct response (as I did too,) it’s easy for your memory to tell you the clue boiled down to “what’s the word for a group of islands?” But as always, it’s helpful to look at the way the clue was actually worded:
It’s easy to see how, when under the bright lights and the pressure of hearing the Jeopardy music play and knowing you only have 30 seconds and being on national television, your mind could get stuck into a rut of trying to think of a word for a sea that contains many island groups, rather than a word for an island group.
I read it a bit differently. I was thinking it was a process of discovery, like finding some new land and, after many decades of exploration, turns out that it was a whole continent. I thought that “this word originally referred to the Aegean” meant that something that was once believed to be small turned out to be much larger than originally thought. So I said “what is Mediterranean?”
That’s what I did, but I got out of the rut in time. Who knows if I could have on camera.
PS do the contestants hear the think music?
I said the exact same thing in post #907 a few days ago. This is now twice she’s left big money on the table.
I’m reading this in the comfort of my own home and I can’t see how that clue is asking for a word for an island group. If the word originally meant the Aegean, then it’s a word for sea, not a word for island group.
The first definition listed by Merriam Webster is “an expanse of water with many scattered islands”. “Island group” is the second definition. I guess it just depends on whether you look at it as ‘the area that has a group of islands’ or ‘the group of islands within an area’.
For further explanation they have a Did You Know blurb:
The Greeks called it the Aegean Pelagos and the Italians referred to it as Arcipelago (meaning “chief sea”), but English speakers now call it the Aegean Sea. Numerous islands dot its expanse, and 16th-century English speakers adopted a modified form of its Italian name for any sea with a similar scattering of islands. In time, archipelago came to refer to the groups of islands themselves, and now it is often used figuratively, as in, for example, “an archipelago of high-rise buildings.”
Definitions aside, the above says that the derivation in English is from an Italian and Greek compound, making Jeopardy’s “From Greek for chief and sea” somewhat misleading. However, the Latin archi(Italian arci) is ultimately from the Greek arkhi, meaning chief or leading.
More host rumors, this time from Buzzy, who some people think is hinting that he will be the one, although possibly only for prime time Celebrity Jeopardy. You have to look at the whole Twitter thread in the linked article to see his cryptic contribution.
Please, please, please let Buzzy be the permanent host of the daily show!
What linked article?
Oops. Forgot to paste.
Anyone else think that Tweedleee and Tweedledum clue was poorly worded? At first I felt bad for Megan and thought they should have let her keep it, because the way my brain parsed the clue was “this one [pair] of ‘Through the Looking Glass’ characters fits the category.” It sounded like they were asking for a pair. But now that I read the clue again:
I can see that, parsed logically, it means “this one member of a particular pair of ‘Through the Looking Glass’ characters.” That’s awfully hard to make sense of in three seconds, though.
Agreed, it’s badly worded. “Of a certain pair of characters, this one” could be interpreted as “of a certain pair of characters, this PAIR”, because the question as worded seems to be about a number of pairs of characters (in “Looking Glass”).
Messy, anyway.
(6/23) I only know one civil war admiral’s quote, so that was more crib note than hint.
I thought of damn the torpedoes, but thought it was from Manila Bay.
I wasn’t sure whether torpedoes even existed before the 20th century, but that was my best guess.
I thought “Damn the torpedoes” was from the War of 1812.
I learned a lot of history, but not too well.
I don’t think of Tom Petty as a “Southern rocker,” but I guess he was born in Florida. I think of him more as having a kind of California sound.
At that time, torpedo did not mean a projectile. It was a mine.
Yeah, me too. I kept thinking of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, et al. But I couldn’t think of a Southern Rock solo artist who fit the bill.
Petty and several other Heartbreakers were from Gainesville. Per the Wikipedia article, they relocated to California in 1974, the year Petty turned 24.