I wonder.
There’s always the risk that the last answer is something like “Eric Clapton’s son died in this city, that also once had the World Trade Center.”
Hmmmm. Should I have said “the question” instead? :dubious: 
The official Jeopardy! lingo is: The thing that Alex reads is “the clue.” The thing the contestants say (or write, in the case of Final Jeopardy) is “the response.” The response “must be phrased in the form of a question.”
Note that the “question” phrasing doesn’t have to make sense. When I auditioned to be a contestant, the example they gave us was that a response like “Who is the Mississippi River?” would be perfectly acceptable.
Forget it, jake. It’s Jeopardy!
true, I’m not sure which you meant.
It’s the terminology. Technically, what comes up in the panels is the answer, and the contestant provides the question. But in reality, the panel is the “question” and the contestant provides the “answer” (in the form of a question).
I’m never sure which I should be calling the questions and which the answers when talking to people. Don’t know who is or is not aware of the Jeopardy conceit.
It’s a gimmick. “Who is Eric Clapton?” has a lot more “answers” than “This rock guitarist played for Cream and Derick and the Dominoes” has “questions”.
Ninja’d by MrAtoz - I never knew the official lingo.
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks’.
I’ve noticed that. In the British edition of the show (the pilot, at least; I don’t know if it’s even on in GB these days), the response had to be gramatically correct in terms of both subject and verb. So “Who is the Mississippi* River?” would not have been an acceptable response.
The British pilot used to be on YouTube; I don’t know if it still is.
*Am I the only one who always has the song running through his mind when writing or typing “Mississippi”? :dubious:
I’m told–although I don’t know firsthand–that the original U.S. version of the show, hosted by Art Fleming, was similarly persnickety. There’s a story that, in one case, a contestant answered “Who is Hamlet?” and was judged wrong, because the clue had been obviously referring to the play, not the character, and so it should have been “What is Hamlet?”
I grew up watching that version, and I think you’re right. I like Alex Trebek (who is a *very *sharp guy and probably knows at least 80% of the correct responses before he reads them), but Art Fleming always came across as much more erudite, probably because of his “educated” speech. Alex is much more casual.
So in the game in question, regarding Medieval Literature, a question to an earlier answer had been El Cid, thereby eliminating that answer as a possibility for FJ. But I had already deduced the FJ answer. Here’s how:
A: Daily go into your local cerebral watering hole (in my case a pool hall) where they like to put on Jeopardy! rather than Sportscenter; as Alex announces the category say, “Who will buy me a shot if I can guess it?”; after the unsuspecting dupe says, “I will,” reply, “Le Chancon de Roland,” in your best Trebekian Quebecois; order Glenlivet, neat, and sip it. Smugly.
Q: How do you win at Final Jeopardy! by reading The New York Times?
Eventually even the most degenerate of pool-playing gamblers figures out that you must have inside knowledge, but part of the fun is finding the newest pigeon. One of my short bucket-list items is to win on Jeopardy! and I have passed the test three times. I am a little irritated that the usual on line test that comes in January hasn’t happened yet.
Still, I take solace in finding squab from time to time and, in the words of Chief Dann George, “endeavor to persevere.”
Now, for the cineophile, in what film does Chief Dan George utter the line, “Endeavor to persevere?”
Heh I have been to five auditions. As soon as the producers run low on boring middle-aged white men, I am a shoe-in.
What is One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest?
incorrect.
BZZZ
JAQ?
What is “The Outlaw Josie Wales?”
Hmmmmm.
What is Dances with Wolves? :dubious:
Before I go further in the thread… “Little Big Man.”
Damn! Wrong again.
Are you Craig Ferguson in real life?
I’m a Jeopardy junky and I do the same thing. I can usually get one a month correct without seeing the question. If you watch the show enough (and I watch all of them), there is a certain pattern that you get a feel for.
When I was a kid, it seemed like the most common response, and my go to for anything literature-related that I didn’t know, was “What is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf??”
The only contestant that got it “right” only gave the last names of the two athletes. Which given the category should have been wrong.
IMO, its not alliterative if only the last name is said.
Who is Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire (incidentally the contestant got it right spelled as “MacGuire”)
The convention is that last names are sufficient to identify a person, unless the first name is needed to resolve an ambiguity. So, if there’s a clue about U.S. presidents, “who is Roosevelt” won’t be sufficient. And you can get yourself in trouble if you give a first name and it’s wrong.
In this case, even though the category was “alliterative athletes”, nothing in the way the clue was phrased forced you to give the alliterative response. It just asked you to identify the two people. Whichever contestant got that right played it correctly, in my opinion.
When I was watching that episode, I saw the category and thought “hmm, who would be some alliterative athletes? Well, there’s Mark McGuire. Oh, and Sammy Sosa.”
If anybody else got that Final Jeopardy from just the category, I’d be impressed.
I would agree with the Last name only would apply if the category was SI Sportsman of the Year and they asked for the two alliterative athletes who shared the 1998 award.
But since the category was Alliterative Athletes, I think the correct response should be alliterative.
I do not have a citation, but I remember instances where a first name was required, that didn’t have to satisfy an ambiguity. And it was because of the name of the category.
And no I probably would not have come up with two different people for that category, I probably would have said Barry Bonds or Mickey Mantle.