Final Jeopardy! Clues

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alietr
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by alietr »

jlgarfield wrote:^ Well, they have their 'county-like' governments. The other state was Rhode Island.
I don't remember the question saying 'county-like'. I thought you were referring to the terminology.

Really? RI? I don't remember that.
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by jlgarfield »

^ Oh. My sincere apologies for being a bit misleading of the wording of the clue.
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by jlgarfield »

New one:

U.S. PRESIDENTS

He was the first U.S. president born in the 20th century
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by Cat Hammarskjold »

jlgarfield wrote:New one:

U.S. PRESIDENTS

He was the first U.S. president born in the 20th century
Spoiler
Lyndon Johnson
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by jlgarfield »

^ Yes. :D
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by opusthepenguin »

Ummm... what am I missing here? LBJ was almost eight years older than JFK.
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by seaborgium »

opusthepenguin wrote:Ummm... what am I missing here? LBJ was almost eight years older than JFK.
Which is why he was first.
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by opusthepenguin »

seaborgium wrote:
opusthepenguin wrote:Ummm... what am I missing here? LBJ was almost eight years older than JFK.
Which is why he was first.
Ah. So we're saying the question is "Which US president was born earliest in the 20th century?" I took the question to be "Which was the first U.S. president born in the 20th century." My bad.
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by seaborgium »

opusthepenguin wrote:
seaborgium wrote:
opusthepenguin wrote:Ummm... what am I missing here? LBJ was almost eight years older than JFK.
Which is why he was first.
Ah. So we're saying the question is "Which US president was born earliest in the 20th century?" I took the question to be "Which was the first U.S. president born in the 20th century." My bad.
I would assert the bad is not yours...
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by dhkendall »

Bumping the post for one I thought of:

COUNTRIES OF THE WORLD

It's the only country that can be spelled solely with the seven most common letters in English

(Note: I didn't do much research other than seeing a list of the most common letters and noticing the first seven could be anagrammed for a country name. I didn't notice if any others fit, and I also realize there may be different lists of the most common letters (hint: Pat and Vanna are filthy liars), but this fits the circumstances that led me to it.)
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by opusthepenguin »

dhkendall wrote:It's the only country that can be spelled solely with the seven most common letters in English

(Note: I didn't do much research other than seeing a list of the most common letters and noticing the first seven could be anagrammed for a country name.
Spoiler
My first thought was Eritrea but I guess r doesn't make the cut.
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by seaborgium »

opusthepenguin wrote:
dhkendall wrote:It's the only country that can be spelled solely with the seven most common letters in English

(Note: I didn't do much research other than seeing a list of the most common letters and noticing the first seven could be anagrammed for a country name.
Spoiler
My first thought was Eritrea but I guess r doesn't make the cut.
I thought of
Spoiler
ETAOINSHRDLU
as the first 12 most common letters, which led to
Spoiler
Estonia.
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by dhkendall »

seaborgium wrote:
opusthepenguin wrote:
dhkendall wrote:It's the only country that can be spelled solely with the seven most common letters in English

(Note: I didn't do much research other than seeing a list of the most common letters and noticing the first seven could be anagrammed for a country name.
Spoiler
My first thought was Eritrea but I guess r doesn't make the cut.
I thought of
Spoiler
ETAOINSHRDLU
as the first 12 most common letters, which led to
Spoiler
Estonia.

I figured the first one to get this would be Seaborgium. (Ok I had s short list of about three or four boardies but Sg was definitely on it.)
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by Volante »

dhkendall wrote:
seaborgium wrote:
opusthepenguin wrote:
dhkendall wrote:It's the only country that can be spelled solely with the seven most common letters in English

(Note: I didn't do much research other than seeing a list of the most common letters and noticing the first seven could be anagrammed for a country name.
Spoiler
My first thought was Eritrea but I guess r doesn't make the cut.
I thought of
Spoiler
ETAOINSHRDLU
as the first 12 most common letters, which led to
Spoiler
Estonia.

I figured the first one to get this would be Seaborgium. (Ok I had s short list of about three or four boardies but Sg was definitely on it.)
Dangit, I had to fix our solar panels and didn't see this earlier...
I did think of the penguin's answer first, fwiw.
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by opusthepenguin »

dhkendall wrote:(Note: I didn't do much research other than seeing a list of the most common letters and noticing the first seven could be anagrammed for a country name. I didn't notice if any others fit, and I also realize there may be different lists of the most common letters (hint: Pat and Vanna are filthy liars), but this fits the circumstances that led me to it.)
Well, WoF is deliberately withholding all but one vowel. If you do that and use ETAOIN SHRDLU, you get ETNSHRDL. So the question is why do they omit H and D? The answer to that is obvious if you think about it. L is found in more words than H and D.

See, when you say "most common," you mean the letters that you would most commonly use if you were setting type. That's what ETAOIN SHRDLU is all about. That means that the words "the" and "and" get a lot more votes than the word "bilge". But if you let each word have only one vote, L gets more votes than H or D. For the final round on Wheel, they are quite unlikely to use "the" or "and" more than once. So L is probably more common than H or D.

Why they rearrange the letters to RSTLNE, I don't know. But I think those letter choices are probably correct. They're at least defensible.
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by econgator »

opusthepenguin wrote:Why they rearrange the letters to RSTLNE, I don't know. But I think those letter choices are probably correct. They're at least defensible.
I'd guess it's because that's the order most people called them.
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by MarkBarrett »

I don't know enough about it to write a proper clue, but this thread is the better place for it than the currents events thread.

The 4/24/17 NYT crossword puzzle had its first use of the term:
Spoiler
NOTHINGBURGER
I had zero recognition of it, but it seems to be some kind of political thing used on cable news as far as I can tell with quick research.

It appears to me it's the kind of thing the J! writers like to spring on us with some of us jumping all over it like it's the easiest thing ever and the other side being NHOI.
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by Lefty »

MarkBarrett wrote: Sun Apr 23, 2017 11:50 pm
Spoiler
NOTHINGBURGER
I'll have it with Liederkranz, please.
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by Bartleby »

MarkBarrett wrote: Sun Apr 23, 2017 11:50 pm The 4/24/17 NYT crossword puzzle had its first use of the term:
Spoiler
NOTHINGBURGER
I had zero recognition of it
Yes, I was unfamiliar with the term as well. A Google search brings up "about 92,100 results" with recent uses in many articles about politics, including a WSJ article about the term dating back to gossip columnist Louella Parsons (who was a rival of Hedda Hopper) in the 1950s.
I would prefer not to.
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Re: Final Jeopardy! Clues

Post by nserven »

opusthepenguin wrote: Mon Jan 02, 2017 2:29 pm
dhkendall wrote:(Note: I didn't do much research other than seeing a list of the most common letters and noticing the first seven could be anagrammed for a country name. I didn't notice if any others fit, and I also realize there may be different lists of the most common letters (hint: Pat and Vanna are filthy liars), but this fits the circumstances that led me to it.)
Well, WoF is deliberately withholding all but one vowel. If you do that and use ETAOIN SHRDLU, you get ETNSHRDL. So the question is why do they omit H and D? The answer to that is obvious if you think about it. L is found in more words than H and D.
Interesting, too, is that all of those are 1-point tiles in Scrabble, except for D (2 points) and H (a whopping 4 points, more than C, M, B, or P).
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