Danger! Fans Call Out Writers for Abusing ‘Alliteration’

Danger! fans are quick to call out questionable clues. However, on the October 31 episode, Grammar sticklers focused on something specific: a possible misuse of alliteration with the phrase “Happy Hour.”

The participants were returning champions Joseph Carlsteina graduate student from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Greg Jolin, a systems specialist and accountant from Raymond, New Hampshire, and Alicia Buffa, a translator from Montreal, Quebec.

In danger! round, Jolin (who would continue win his first match with $24,001), selected the $200 clue in the “A Matter of Time” category.

It read: “The Navy popularized this alliterative term for scheduled entertainment time; it is popular in bars all over the world.” He replied: “Happy Hour.” Ken Jennings ruled that he was right, as this was the desired response.

But many fans on Reddit and elsewhere weren’t so convinced. While some shared that they were happy to hear that the term came from the Navy, quite a few argued that “Happy Hour” doesn’t meet the definition of an alliteration. While both words start with the same letter, they don’t start with the same sound.

“Since when is ‘happy hour’ alliterative?” wrote one fan.

Recent nine-day champion Isaac Hirsch replied, “Happy and hour both start with H, so it’s alliterative.”

However, other users turned grammar police have also raised the alarm, with a third replying: “Alliteration is said to refer to sound. ‘Photogenic frog’ is alliterative. ‘Happy hour’ is not that.”

“The ‘litera’ in ‘alliteration’ is the Latin word for ‘letter,'” argued a fourth.

“Several online dictionaries disagree,” a fifth wrote, citing the dictionary definitions below:

Merriam Webster: defines alliteration as “the repetition of usually initial consonant sounds in two or more adjacent words or syllables (such as wild and woolly, threatening crowds)”

But dictionary.com has two definitions: “the beginning of two or more stressed syllables of a phrase” or “the beginning of two or more words of a phrase with the same letter.”

According to the Oxford English Dictionary‘Alliteration’ indeed comes from Latin and means ‘to the letter’.

But as someone else noted, there is still ambiguity, as they wrote: “In Latin there was very little distinction between letter and sound. Things were spelled the way they were pronounced and pronounced the way they were spelled. The same goes for Italian. The definition is quite outdated when it comes to English.”

This isn’t the first time a lead has been questioned during season 41, which premiered on September 9. “girls wearing glasses” controversy earlier this week, as well as several Final Jeopardy triple-stumpers fans felt that was the case “terrible” and its acceptance That “unreadable” last comment on Jeopardy.

What do you think, was Danger! wrongly calling “Happy Hour” an alliteration? Let us know in the comments section!