At work, we have this thing we do where someone will write a trivia question on the whiteboard, and whoever gets the question correct (or closest, as judged by the questioner) writes the next trivia question.
We’re having an argument over the meaning of a recent question. It was something like “This show’s host interviews celebrities while eating hot wings.” Everyone was guessing the name of the show, but the person who wrote the question said they were looking for the name of the host and is adamant that this is obvious from the wording.
So, what do you think is being asked from that phrasing? Is it the name of the show, or the host?
I think this will be a lopsided poll. I mean the question can be equivalently rewritten to “The host of this show interviews celebrities while eating hot wings.”
If the name of the host was the intended answer, the phrasing should have been something like “This host’s show has them interviewing celebrities while eating hot wings.”.
When reading the OP I thought the question was going to be about who is eating the hot wings, the host or the celebrities, which is at least somewhat debatable (though I still think it’s pretty clearly the host, and I have never seen or heard of the show in question). But the OP’s actual question isn’t even close. Is the question-setter a native English speaker?
Yes, the question-writer is a native English speaker, and the Jeopardy-esque way it was written doesn’t help, either. We were unanimous in the belief that he was asking for the name of the show, hence the confusion.
The only way to interpret it is as a Jeopardy “answer”. It’s certainly not an ordinary question, grammatically. I don’t see any way to interpret the “question” in the OP where the host would be the correct answer.
You could parse it as “This (show’s host) interviews…”, i.e., asking for the host.
But it’s much more natural to parse it as “(This show)'s host interviews…”, i.e., asking for the show, because we don’t usually refer to a person as a “show’s host”.
I would only parse it that way if the possessive was omitted, turning “show” into an adjective, like “home” in “home owner.” So you’d write it as “This show host interviews…”