‘Jeopardy!’ Fans Unhappy With ‘Unreasonable’ Pronunciation Ruling

Are Jeopardy!‘s rulings on pronunciation getting too inconsistent? That’s what some fans were thinking after a returning champ was instantly shut down over many perceived as a vocal slip-up on an otherwise correct response on a top-row clue.

On Wednesday, November 13’s episode, two-day champ Joey DeSena, a development engineer from Raleigh, North Carolina, faced Lois Dioro, a realtor from West Haven, Connecticut, and Evan Dorey, a data analytics director from Toronto, Ontario.

In the Double Jeopardy! round, DeSena selected the $200 clue in the “You’ll Learn to Adapt” category. It read, “From 2013 to 2017, Tom Mison kept his head during some rough situations as this TV character in ‘Sleepy Hollow.’” The correct response was “Ichabod Crane.”

DeSena responded, “Who is “Ichapod Crane?” according to the J-Archive. Host Ken Jennings stepped in before he got the opportunity to correct himself. “He was — no, we can’t take that,” Jennings said. Fellow contestant Dorey got it correct afterward.

The ruling cost DeSena a $400 swing, and he wound up in contention in Final Jeopardy by only $100 since Dioro and Dorey were tied at $14,600, and he had $7,400. Dorey won the game with the sole Final Jeopardy get, with the judges allowing “Highland” instead of “Highlands” making him the new champ (which was a separate can of worms and amplified the juxtaposition.)

While the ruling didn’t impact the results, many fans took to the Reddit thread for the episode saying the ruling was unnecessarily harsh and he should have gotten the leeway from the judges to correct himself.

“Joey’s voice catching on ‘Ichabod’ and not getting credit for it is crazy,” one user wrote.

“Absolutely an occasion for ‘Say it again…?’ C’mon, ‘Ichapod’ isn’t even a name and switching B/P phonemes is very much a part of some accents,” wrote another.

“The judging seems to be rather arbitrary and capricious to me. Can’t accept ‘ichapod,’ but can accept ‘highland,’” wrote a third referring to what later happen in Final Jeopardy.

“I’m not sure about Highland and the precedent there, but ‘Ichapod’ is a different pronunciation which they typically take a hard line against. Changes the spelling,” defended a fifth.

“‘Ichapod’ would definitely be wrong, but it seemed like Joey just got tongue-tied and it came out a little funny (so that it was somewhere between a b and p sound), so I think it would have been reasonable for Ken to give him another crack at it (“Say it again?”) just to be sure,” agreed a sixth.

“Yeah I agree with that take,” wrote one more. “The judges seem to be harsher about it as of recent but maybe I just didn’t notice in the past. Difficult to get real data on that.”

“I think it became too late to do this because Ken had already started ruling on Joey’s response before catching himself over the ‘pod’ snafu. So at that point he had to let him have it or rule against him. The BMS/second chance option was off the table at that point,” wrote one more.

This isn’t the first time Jeopardy! has been hit with a mispronunciation controversy recently, with fans wondering if the judges could be more consistent. Last month, four-day champ Will Wallace was denied a slight variation on “weimaraner.” Earlier this season, the refusal of a player’s take on “anesthesiologist” caused a stir. Last May, all three contestants were ruled incorrect for not pronouncing Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s name correctly.

However, there have been some questionably lenient rulings in tow. Last season, a player was ruled correct for a blatant mispronunciation of “larynx” (“lar-nyx?”). Another player got three stabs to get to “The observatory of Greenwich,” first saying “Greenwich,” then “Greenwhich Observatory,” finally getting there as Jennings quipped, “I did not want to leave you hanging.”