“Jeopardy!” fans are having a debate of their own.
Some viewers were outraged after a contestant mispronounced a word but it was accepted as a correct answer on Monday’s episode.
Matt Brooks, a healthcare IT analyst from Virginia, was at the center of the controversy.
He was winning against Zoe Strassfield, a park ranger and writer from New York, and Cat Pisacano, a nurse from New York, heading into the “Jeopardy!” round.
Brooks took the $400 clue in the “Taking You to School” category.
The clue read: “Anatomy: There are both false & true vocal cords in this hollow, tubular structure, also called the voice box.”
He answered “larnyx,” mispronouncing larynx.
However, host Ken Jennings accepted his guess.
“Oh, yes, we will take that,” said Jennings, who then repeated the word with the correct pronunciation.
Brooks won the game with $10,600.
Fans were upset over the larynx debacle and aired their grievances with the show — and Jennings — in a Reddit thread.
“How in the world did they accept ‘larnyx’ as a correct response for ‘larynx,’ ” the first post in the thread began. “They say pronunciation doesn’t count, but they routinely count answers wrong when the spelling and pronunciation don’t go together – ‘larnyx’ is just not a conceivable way to pronounce ‘larynx.’ We were expecting them to come back and correct the score on that and they didn’t. It really soured the whole game for me.”
A fan responded: “Yeah, that was unbelievable. How on earth can that be considered an acceptable answer when historically the judges have been total sticklers for pronunciations. That imply an extremely incorrect spelling.”
Another person noted that Pisacano “was flustered” by the mispronounced word being accepted and could’ve won the game if that didn’t happen.
A different response said, “It was pronounced laranyx, which, as a former speech pathologist, is an annoying unacceptable pronunciation.”
However, other fans took the opposite stance on the topic of how to pronounce larynx.
“From my experience, larynx is pronounced like that in the US south frequently. In school, my biology and anatomy teachers both pronounced it that way. It always lead to a visceral cringe throughout my body,” read one of the Reddit comments.
Another said, “I had an anatomy instructor who said it like that too and I felt the same after hearing it.”
“I thought I was pronounced ‘Larnyx’ since that’s all I have ever heard in the Midwest,” a different fan wrote.
Someone responded, “I’m Midwestern too, was curious if maybe this is a regional thing!”
Other fans pointed out that late host Alex Trebek accepted “larnyx” as an answer in November 1997 and March 2006.
During the latter game, Trebek said that it was “a common pronunciation.”
“Jeopardy!” airs weekdays at 7 p.m. ET.