Final Jeopardy: Wordplay (10-15-14)

The Final Jeopardy question (10/15/2014), in the category “Wordplay” was:

Subtract a letter from the name of a keystroke found in computer commands & you get this violent reaction to social change.

3-day champ Shane Curtis has won $42,001 so far. Today he takes on these two players: Regina Cabrera, from Monrovia, CA; and John Campbell, from Weymouth, MA.

Round 1: John found the Jeopardy! round Daily Double in “Surrounded by Water” under the $400 clue, the third clue chosen. He was the only one with any money — $400. He was offered the $1,000 allowance, but decided to make it a true Daily Double and he was RIGHT.

In 1869, Africa became completely surrounded by water with the opening of this. show

Shane finished in the lead with $7,000. John was second with $4,000 and Regina was last, in the red for $400.

Round 2: John found the first Daily Double in “Health & Medicine” under the $1,200 clue. In the lead with $16,400, he was $6,200 ahead of Shane in second place. He bet $1,600 and thought it was “lock in”. That was WRONG.

In 1911 a Swiss psychiatrist coined this term for a withdrawal into one’s inner world in patients with schizophrenia. show

Regina found the last Daily Double in “Nicknames” under the $1,200 clue. She was in third place with $2,800, $15,600 less than John in second place. She bet $2,000 and she was RIGHT.

Once known as “the Napoleon of the West“, he did mess with Texas. show

John finished in the lead with $20,400. Shane was next with $12,200 and Regina was in third place with $4,800.

NONE of the contestants got Final Jeopardy! right.

WHAT IS BACKLASH? Alex explained that to get the answer, all you have to do is take the “s” out of “backslash”. Merriam-Webster has 3 definitions for “backlash”. The pertinent one is No. 3: a strong adverse reaction (as to a recent political or social development).

The only words that came to mind over here were “riot” and “revolt” (and we could think of no computer keystrokes or commands to help us out with those). Backlash isn’t in M-W’s thesaurus so we also looked it up on Thesaurus.com for some synonyms. Here’s what they’ve got: reaction, repercussion, resentment, resistance, response, retaliation, backfire, boomerang, counteraction, kickback, recoil, tangle.



Regina didn’t have a guess and she didn’t bet anything either so she remained at $4,800.

Shane came up with “upheaval”. He bet and lost it all.

John had some letters down that Alex couldn’t read and neither could we, but it looked like he was trying to figure out something with the CTRL key. He lost his $4,000 bet but the $16,400 he had left made him the new Jeopardy! champ.

FJ Results: 10-15-14

John Campbell is a romance novelist, a career he got into after joking about it for a while. He said his first endeavor paid for his engagement ring. The second paid for his wedding and he’s been doing it ever since.

2 years ago:: Only ONE of the players got this FJ in “Countries & Populations”

If it were a nation, a state with a 2-word name in this country would be the world’s 6th most-populous at 200 million. show

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8 Responses

  1. WandaB says:

    I too would like to know what books John has written or under what pen name he uses. I have looked under the John Campbell’s and none of them seem to be him. If he paid for his engagement ring and wedding by writing books and continuing to do so then please be so kind as to share with the rest of us as to where we can find them. We would love to give them a try……..

  2. Val says:

    What is John Campbell’s pen name? Or titles of his books?

    • Dorene Blaylock says:

      I too would like to know the titles of John Campbell’s books. Does he write under a pen name? If so, what?

    • VJ says:

      I guess we’ll have to wait and see if he tells his pen name (and I guess he does write under one because I looked for his books and didn’t find any. Even his hometown paper didn’t mention any)

  3. Rikki Chez says:

    I posed this FJ question to my IT guys. Without much hesitation, one responded that the correct word is SHIfT. I’m still laughing. Much better answer than BACKsLASH.

  4. john blahuta says:

    and another offer for a tie, but no right response(s). i had no clue either until i saw the answer and then of course it made sense. but a VERY tough fj.there are so many commands and to go through them in 30 seconds….. added to the difficulty was the fact that it was a letter in the middle of a combined word that had to be taken out and not the first letter.(well, it was the first letter of the second part of the word). but compared to other fj clues this NOT easy by a long shot.
    a deserved win since john WAS in the lead and it seems that ties are now more and more becoming the fashion.
    so much for going into double digit wins for shane, but maybe john?

  5. DrTomWay says:

    For the record, the backslash character (or keystroke) is not used in any computer commands. I’m a computer science professor and software engineer. Backslash is only used commonly by programmers and certain typographers as an “escape character” to create characters that otherwise cannot be typed, such as a tab or newline. What a disappointing and horribly crafted Final Jeopardy question tonight! Three very smart contestants would agree.

    • VJ says:

      well, thanks for that, DrTom. Perhaps they should have said programming languages instead of computer commands? Right after that, I was editing something and had to put a backslash in before “em” to end my italics (grrr!)