opusthepenguin wrote: ↑Wed May 24, 2023 6:10 pm
Lot of interesting thoughts. In case there's no box in the poll, I'll note that I do think the ruling was correct. I would not be in favor of having Ben invited back. Part of the reason for that, I suppose, is that, as dirty as this trick was, it would be an even dirtier trick to make some poor returning champ face Ben rather than a second newcomer. Even the 8-time champ who faced him this way got mowed down. But that's just an aggravating factor. I would not be in favor of bringing back a poor chump who lost their only game due to this technicality. I'd just be steamed on their behalf.
But when all the venting is done, the character's name is Benedick and there are apparently no variants in the Shakespearean canon. The arguments about Shakespeare's own variable spelling and the closeness of the two names do not change this fact. They just confirm my feeling that this was a dirty trick.
But a "trick" that I'd bet did not occur to the writers, who knew the correct response and who have had the name on the show many times. I will guess that some of them are even well acquainted with the play. I wiil stipulate, though, that the 3 times they've asked for his name, twice it was a triple stumper and the 3d time the correct responder was...Ken Jennings... Maybe somebody could check the tape!
opusthepenguin wrote: ↑Wed May 24, 2023 6:10 pm
Part of the reason for that, I suppose, is that, as dirty as this trick was, it would be an even dirtier trick to make some poor returning champ face Ben rather than a second newcomer. Even the 8-time champ who faced him this way got mowed down.
That really was like watching Dorothy drop a house in Oz.
It occurs to me that - to illustrate something I suggested earlier - if you say Benedic- Cumberbatch no one will notice you left out the -t. But if you say Benedic- Cumberbatch as Benedic -t, people will notice and you'll be counted wrong....(while praised for your casting sense...)
It IS kind of funny that Benedick never caught on...
Anachronism wrote: ↑Wed May 24, 2023 5:11 pm
Let's go back to Solzhenitsyn. He's been in dozens of clues. And twice, according to the archive, in FJ - once requiring his major novel and not his name and once, back in 1990, his name. The winner (with a 2nd-position bet that would make us all proud) wrote "Solzhenitzin" and Alex made a point of saying spelling doesn't count in FJ. However, I think (and I've checked a few places), the last syllable should be "sin" and not "zin", making this a remarkably similar case to yesterday's show.
The last syllable isn't "sin" or "zin," it's "tsin" (the "ts" is a single Cyrillic letter) which is indistinguishable from "tzin."
This is an interesting rabbit-hole, I guess. I haven't comprehensively checked everything that can be checked. So far, everything has come up "sin" for the last syllable with respect to his name. I see the Tse character in Cyrillic, but the suggested pronunciations for that character are more tsin than tzin. So when translating the word I usually would write "czar", should the equivalent tsar be pronounced the same or like tsunami? I am not a Russian speaker by any means. The Russian spelling starts with the same ts character.
I still object to you referring to "sin" as the last syllable. Anyway, I too can't find any transliteration of the ts (or rather the ц) as tz in Solzhenitsyn's name—going international, I find German uses a z by itself, and several Roman-alphabet Slavic languages (e.g. Polish, Czech, Slovakian) use c. Hungarian uses a c as well, and Romanian uses ț. But whether tz is used is beside the point. It's whether it's pronounced the same, and I say English pronunciation makes no distinction between tz and ts. Going the other way, imagine a contestant writing "quetsal" or "Horowits" to an FJ clue whose correct response is quetzal or Horowitz. One last thought: another transliteration of tsar/czar is "tzar." It's accepted in an online word game I play.
Maybe somebody could check the tape!