‘Jeopardy!’ fans outraged over mispronounced answer — that Ken Jennings accepted: ‘Soured the whole game’

nypost.com:

a debate of their own.Some viewers were outraged after a contestant mispronounced a word but it was accepted as a correct answer on Monday’s episode.Matt Brooks, a healthcare IT analyst from Virginia, was at the center of the controversy.

He was winning against Zoe Strassfield, a park ranger and writer from New York, and Cat Pisacano, a nurse from New York, heading into the “Jeopardy!” round.Brooks took the $400 clue in the “Taking You to School” category.

The clue read: “Anatomy: There are both false & true vocal cords in this hollow, tubular structure, also called the voice box.”He answered “larnyx,” mispronouncing larynx.

However, host Ken Jennings accepted his guess.“Oh, yes, we will take that,” said Jennings, who then repeated the word with the correct pronunciation.Brooks won the game with $10,600.Fans were upset over the larynx debacle and aired their grievances with the show — and Jennings — in a Reddit thread. “How in the world did they accept ‘larnyx’ as a correct response for ‘larynx,’ ” the first post in the thread began. “They say pronunciation doesn’t count, but they routinely count answers wrong when the spelling and pronunciation don’t go together – ‘larnyx’ is just not a conceivable way to pronounce ‘larynx.’ We were expecting them to come back and correct the score on that and they didn’t.