Volante wrote: ↑Thu Feb 13, 2020 10:45 am
Are we actually confused by the use of 'Sully' or 'Mooch' or are we hypothesizing that ourselves, the judges or others might be confused?
As far as usage, 'Mooch' got heavy use in print (411 hits alone using Google search site:nytimes.com "Mooch". Using "Sully" gives almost 6,000 but I'm too lazy to filter by time and knock off movie references.)
It's not like these are obscure nicknames, they got heavy use in their time.
Coming from the heavily-Irish Boston metropolitan area, I can say with a fair bit of certainty that there must be at least 99,999 people who go by "Sully", and about 70% of them are cops. I was a bit surprised that "Sully" was accepted alone - "Sully Sullenberger" certainly should be accepted, but "Sully" ought to get a "BMS", particularly 11 years or so after the incident. He's not quite Oprah-level of fame, but in a lot of news stories at the time he was called "Sully" simply because "Sullenberger" doesn't roll off the tongue as easily, and I would guess that nobody (except perhaps his parents) knows him as "Chesley".
I thought they were even easier on accepting "The Mooch", and it should have been at least BMSed. I'm not sure if that's an actual nickname he uses, or if it's a nickname that the media and late-night comedians gave him during his 11-day tenure.
The rules of names aren't always applied consistently from game-to-game, but if they're smart, each individual clue should have a note on whether the first name is required (Hemsworth/Roosevelt) and if informal mononyms or nicknames are acceptable (Oprah, Billy the Kid, maybe Mariah?), or if it's a true mononym with the last name is dropped and rarely used (Cher, Madonna). And, of course, those rules could change for each name - perhaps there's another Oprah out there who will become famous, so in the 90th season of Jeopardy!, you'd have to supply both names. After all, "President Bush" was a sufficient answer for about 12 years.