Jeopardy! has had some controversial calls – and most of them have to do with contestants’ pronunciations.
The long-running game show had another mishap during the October 11 episode. During the episode, Eamonn Campbell from Manchester, Vermont, and Dot White from Bethesda, Maryland competed against five-day winner Mark Fitzpatrick from Riverside, Connecticut.
When Eamonn buzzed in to answer one clue, he seemed to pronounce “anesthesiologist” as “ana-tee-siologist.” Host Ken Jennings asked him to repeat himself, and he once again mispronounced it and did not get points.
Dot then buzzed in, pronouncing it correctly and getting the points. Fans took to a discussion thread about the episode on Reddit after Eamonn’s answer.
“I thought the ruling against Eamonn on anesthesiologist was tough but fair. But then Dot said it the same way and it was allowed. To my ears, both pronounced the th sound T, not TH,” one fan said.
Another believed that Eamonn pronounced it differently than Dot. “I think Eamonn missed the first “s” sound,” they wrote.
One fan pointed out that Ken tried to give Eamonn a second chance. “They make accommodations for contestants with different speech patterns,” they continued. “Santhosh Sastry’s episode was on a couple weeks before your episode, and he had a heavy accent; Ken and the judges are lenient. That’s why they gave Eamonn a chance to clarify his answer.”
Even though Eamonn missed the answer – he still went on to win the game. He banked $13,700 while Dot came in second with $9,801 and Mark had $4,800.
Last month, a Jeopardy! game that can be played on Amazon’s Alexa devices gave the clue: “This word for a medium purple can be pronounced close to ‘suave’ or in a way that rhymes with ‘cove.'”
The answer was mauve, but people on Reddit were extremely confused that there was more than one way to pronounce the color. “Does anyone pronounce mauve in a way that rhymes with cove????” one fan wrote in a Reddit thread.
They added: “My immediate thought was ‘mauve.’ But then I hesitated because of the ‘cove’ reference. But I went ahead with mauve as my answer and got it right but then Alexa said I was correct and pronounced it as mohve (rhyming with cove). And now I’m all sorts of confused.”
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