“The Final Jeopardy! questions seem to be, by design, things you can’t know. And so it’s not about who knows them, but who can figure them out in 30 seconds.” — “Jeopardy!” host Ken Jennings
Ever wonder what the most frequent category is for Final Jeopardy! on the game show “Jeopardy!”?
If you responded “What is ‘Word Origins?’” I think you’re ready to go on the show.
“So what?” you may then ask.
Well, it just lends support to my longstanding theory that, besides being a bunch of trivia geeks (that’s a compliment), the show’s writers are also avid word people.
Here’s a look at a bunch of actual Jeopardy! categories that support my theory, and their answers:
— “Triple the Double Letter,” which yielded the correct answers “Mississippi and Tennessee,” “coffee mill,” “Chattahoochee,” “committee” and “sleeplessness.”
— “Same Consonant Thrice,” with the answers: “goggles,” “bumblebee,” “engineering,” “misappropriation” and “puddled.”
— “Double Double Letters,” which offered: “frappuccino,” “toothless,” “lessee,” “fricassee” and “bookkeeping.”
— “Alliteration,” with the answers: “March madness,” “deep dish,” “Final Fantasy,” “Planned Parenthood” and “Betty Botter” (who bought bitter butter in the old tongue twister).
— “Two-Letter Scrabble Words,” with the correct responses: “ox,” “pi,” “oh my,” “el” (short for “elevated railroad”) and “ed” (short for “education”).
— “Change a Letter,” which turned “mate” into “maze,” “hem” into “hex,” “miler” into “mixer,” “jilt” into “kilt” and “quality” into “duality.”
— “Six-Letter Rhymes,” which yielded: “peewee,” “hobnob,” “Texmex” and “Pinyin” (the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese).
— “Heteronyms,” which produced these answers, which can each be pronounced two ways: “object,” “resent,” “compact,” “tower” and “mole” (the furry little mammal and the Mexican sauce).
— And not to be outdone by the heteronyms category, “Numeric Homophones” struck back with: “won” (prevailed), “too” (furthermore or very), “fore” (a golfer’s warning), “ate” (what the dog used to do to my homework) and “nein” (the German word for “no”).
“Jeopardy!”‘s love of words seems boundless really. Take the “Compound Words” category that recently popped up on the popular quiz show’s board (in its classic korinna bold font). It dealt with a “kickboxing” “sisterhood” and their “wanderlust” on the “turnpike” while drinking “moonshine.” (If you must drink and wander, don’t drive.)
And the “Etymology” category frequently appears in one of the show’s two rounds, with one set of clues informing us that “shampoo” is from an old Hindi word for “massage” and the Greeks called the ostrich “strouthokamilos” (sparrow-camel). We also learned that “journal” comes from the Old French for “daily,” and that leaves shaped like a hand with its fingers spread are described as “palmate.” (Leaves that are shaped like feathers are “pinnate,” which comes from the Latin “pinna,” meaning “feather.”)
In addition to all of “Jeopardy!”’s word-oriented categories, there are of course many other interesting words that come up during normal play. For instance, there’s the fact that the duodenum – the first portion of the small intestine – is named for its length of about 12 fingerbreadths (a dodecagon is a 12-sided shape).
The word “essay” came into English in a 1597 work by Sir Francis Bacon.
The contradiction-in-terms word “oxymoron” is from the Greek “oxy” (sharp) and “moron.”
And finally, the show posed this word-focused clue to its contestants: “This synonym of ‘definitive’ begins with a synonym of ‘writer.’”
Ahem. What is “authoritative?”
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at jlwitherell19@gmail.com.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
