“Jeopardy!” fans were left angry and confused Wednesday after the game show accepted a technically wrong answer for a final clue.
The final Jeopardy clue read: “It’s the geographic word in the title of a Robert Burns poem about “the mountains … covered with snow … the straths & green valleys below.”
Contestant Evan Dorey wrote “Highland,” and host Ken Jennings accepted the answer. “‘My Heart’s In The Highlands‘ is the name of the poem,” Jennings explained.
However, Dorey’s answer lacking the “s” on the end confused fans.
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“I’m confused,” one user wrote on Reddit. “If a FJ contestant gives a singular name though the correct title is plural, it’s accepted. But if they write that singular and are starting to add s when time runs out, it isn’t?”
“Little confused by that myself,” another responded. “I thought if the answer was a word in a title, the answer needed to be the title word, not a version thereof.”
One user gave their own interpretation of Wednesday’s “Jeopardy!” ruling, which left Dorey the game champ:
“My interpretation of this ruling is: If the clue specifically wanted the full title and he wrote ‘My Heart’s in the Highland’, that would be incorrect. But since they just wanted the word rather than the full title, they’ll take singular or plural.”
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Other Reddit users and fans noted the ruling on a similar word instead of the correct word was “crazy.”
“Crazy ruling,” one wrote. “They shouldn’t be giving credit for similar words. The clue asked for a word in the poem title. Highland is not in the title.”
“Based on today’s FJ ruling, if the clue is about a fruit in the title of a Steinbeck novel and I write ‘What is Grape?’, I guess that’s acceptable,” another added.
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Dorey chimed in on Reddit to reflect on his “Jeopardy!” answer.
“I’m pretty sure the longest 10 seconds of my life were me trying to figure out whether I should put an ‘s’ at the end of Final,” he explained. “I didn’t know the poem so I pretty much had the same debate that raged in this thread against myself – ‘Highlands’ was the place but the phrase ‘Highland Lass’ stuck in my head – did Burns have a poem called ‘To A Highland Lass’? (turns out that phrase actually comes from a Wordsworth poem, so swing and a miss) Which to go with? I figured with FJ, they can’t ask me to be more specific, so less is more and I’ll leave the judges to decide, and this time I got lucky. They didn’t have to stop and confer; it pretty much played out as you saw it so they must have anticipated that potential answer.”
“Overall, what an amazing game – I think the entire second half of DJ my eyes were just back and forth between the scores and the board – living and dying with each back and forth,” he added.
