Twitter Has Crowned 'The Most Annoying Jeopardy! Contestant Ever'

Adrienne Westenfeld
·3 min read
2
Twitter Has Crowned 'The Most Annoying Jeopardy! Contestant Ever'

Matt Amodio can’t be stopped. The current six-day Jeopardy! champion, a PhD student from New Haven, Connecticut, has raked in a whopping $194,800, and shows no signs of ending his winning streak anytime soon. But there’s one thing fans would like to see come to an end: a particular speech habit of Amodio’s.

As one Twitter user put it, “I am impressed with Matt on Jeopardy! but he uses ‘What’s’ regardless of if the answer is a thing or a person—for a few nights now. Shouldn’t a person always be ‘who’?!?” Let’s put it this way: if the correct answer is Anna Farris or John Cleese, as we saw in Wednesday night’s game, the expected response is, “Who is Faris?” or, “Who is Cleese?” Amodio uses “what” fairly universally, buzzing in with answers like, “What’s Faris” and “What’s Cleese?” It’s not just the use of “what” creaming viewers’ corn—it’s also the contraction to “what’s,” rather than “what is.” There’s no one right way to play the game, so long as players are buzzing in their answers in the form of a question, but when the ear is trained to a familiar pattern, something different can be downright jarring.

Amodio’s speech patterns have struck a nerve with the ever-engaged Jeopardy! fan base, who have taken to Twitter to register their complaints with the grammar police. Amodio, meanwhile, is surely laughing all the way to the bank. Below, we’ve rounded up the best of the week’s grammar discourse.

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