Wild Guesses, Jeopardy! Edition

I've mentioned the game show Jeopardy! a number of times, especially recently. Because I've been watching it of late, I've also been thinking about how it forces contestants to show their whole butt (to use a euphemism for the usual wording of that phrase). 

Here's what I mean by that.

People who get onto the show are obviously trivia nerds. They've passed a written test, probably multiple times, and tried out in person. (I've done it.) They know a fair amount of stuff. Among their friends, it may event be what they're known for.

But no one knows everything, as I've pointed out before about the glaring gap of knowledge among most white players. 

So when a player gives a not-just-wrong-but-embarrassing answer to a question, I have to say I almost have a weird sort of respect for them — that they dared to say or write down such a dumb answer.

Here are a couple of examples from a recent game. 

It was Final Jeopardy, with  Women in Literature as the category. The prompt was something about a writer who got a 1912 rejection letter, written in a particular repetitive style that mimicked her own writing.

Now, I would not fault anyone for getting this wrong as long as they came up with the name of a woman writer who was known to be writing around that year. The answer turned out to be Gertrude Stein, which seems obvious as soon as you hear it (and is even more obvious if I could give you the actual wording of the repetitive wording used in the question). 

For instance, one person answered Virginia Woolf, which is what I mean by a legitimate-level wrong answer. 

But here are the other two wrong answers, which are absolute howlers:

• One player (who appeared to be in her early 20s) guessed Sylvia Plath (who was born in 1932).
• The other player, who was a GenXer or older Millennial and also a social studies teacher, started to write Jane Austen, who was pretty famously writing 100 years earlier, onto his slate. 

To his credit, he did cross it out and end with no answer at all. But whew. 

That's what I mean about showing your whole butt: there's no hiding once you commit. You could leave it blank, which might be a better choice, but you're standing there on the stage with just one chance at winning, and what if, what if, you maybe have a 1% chance of being correct? Shouldn't you scribble down the answer that came to you, even though you highly doubt that it's right?

No guts, no glory, maybe. So I offer my respect, and I hope they live it down. 

I was keeping a list of other examples I've seen over the weeks, but I recycled it by accident. If I get a few more, I may post them at some point in the future.