TenPoundHammer wrote:Do any of YOU put down an answer that every single cell in your body is screaming "no, that's absolutely friggin' wrong, don't you dare put it down"?
Yes! Absolutely!
I have a little rule for myself. When I play along at home, I
make myself write down
something for Final Jeopardy. No matter how lost or clueless I am, I write
something down, no matter how silly it is, or how much of a stab in the dark it is.
Sure, some wrong answers might look embarrassing after the fact. But it cannot be stressed enough: as far as gameplay is concerned, there is
literally nothing worse than a blank response for FJ.
Let me share some of my embarrassing wrong responses from recent weeks.
January 21st, category "Museums". "Opened in 2012, the Belfast museum seen here commemorates this, also constructed there." I was really kicking myself afterward with this one. For some reason, I couldn't make the leap from the word "constructed" to a vehicle of some kind that wouldn't necessarily stay in Belfast forever. My brain wouldn't make that "leap" and I was stuck on castles, fortresses, walls, monuments, etc. What I actually wrote down was "The Pale" because I think that was the name of some kind of wall or barrier or something like that separating Northern Ireland from the rest of Ireland. (I have no idea how accurate that is, but it was a vague notion in my head at the time.)
January 31st, category "Fundraising". "In 2011 the city of Savannah granted an exemption allowing the sale of these items outside Juliette Gordon Low's birthplace." There was a crucial gap in my factual knowledge: I didn't know who Juliette Gordon Low was. I knew that probably
if I knew who she was, that would likely make the question easy, but I simply didn't know. So I quickly thought to myself, "Geez, why would there be an item that's sold in some places but not in others?" All I could think of was an item that's controversial for some reason. So, for lack of anything better, I wrote down "Confederate Flags". Which makes no sense for several reasons. For one, they're not associated with fundraising.
The point is, writing down something silly, that only vaguely fits part of the clue, but doesn't really make sense when you consider the larger context, is still better than leaving it blank. Writing down something silly,
fully expecting it to be wrong, is no worse than leaving it blank. My two wild guesses given above, silly and wrongheaded as they were, at least were the names of real things that existed, meaning that there was
some kind of tiny infinitesimal chance that they could be correct. Whereas a blank answer is unequivocally, unmistakably, undisputably
guaranteed to be wrong.