Jeopardy! fans never hesitate to call out clues or rulings they perceive as questionable. However, on Thursday, October 31’s episode, social media was left poring over a clue about something beloved by bar-hoppers and restaurant-goers everywhere.
The contestants were returning champion Joseph Carlstein, a graduate student from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Greg Jolin, a system specialist and accountant from Raymond, New Hampshire, and Alicia Buffa, a translator from Montreal, Quebec.
In the Jeopardy! round, Jolin (who’d go on to win his first game with $24,001), selected the $200 clue in the “A Question of Time” category.
It read, “The Navy popularized this alliterative term for scheduled entertainment time; it’s caught on at bars around the world.” He responded, “Happy Hour.”
Ken Jennings ruled him correct, as this was the desired response.
However, many fans on Reddit and elsewhere were not so convinced. While some shared they enjoyed learning that the term originated with the Navy, quite a few argued that “Happy Hour” does not meet the definition of an alliteration. While both words start with the same letter, they don’t start not the same sound.
“Since when is “happy hour” alliterative?” one fan wrote.
Recent nine day-champ Isaac Hirsch responded: “Happy and hour both begin with H, so it’s alliterative.”
However, other grammar police also sounded their alarms, as a third replied, “Alliteration is supposed to refer to sound. ‘Photogenic frog’ is alliterative. ‘Happy hour’ is not.”
“The ‘litera’ in ‘alliteration’ is the Latin word for ‘letter’” argued a fourth.
“Different online dictionaries disagree,” wrote a fifth, citing the below dictionary definitions:
Merriam Webster: defines alliteration as “the repetition of usually initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words or syllables (such as wild and woolly, threatening throngs)”
But dictionary.com has two definitions: “the commencement of two or more stressed syllables of a word group” or “the commencement of two or more words of a word group with the same letter.”
As per the Oxford English Dictionary, “Alliteration” indeed comes from Latin, meaning “to the letter.”
But as one more pointed out, there’s still ambiguity there, as they wrote: “In Latin, there was very little differentiation between letter and sound. Things were spelled the way they were pronounced and pronounced the way they were spelled. Same is true of Italian. The definition is rather outdated when talking about English.”
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This isn’t the first time a clue has been called into question during Season 41, which premiered September 9. Of course, there was the “girls who wears glasses” controversy earlier this week, as well as multiple Final Jeopardy triple-stumpers fans felt were “terrible” and the acceptance of that “illegible” Final Jeopardy response.
What do you think, was Jeopardy! in the wrong in calling “Happy Hour” an alliteration? Let us know in the comments section!
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