Jeopardy is Suprisingly Fair! Or Badly-Designed!

I don't know if Jeopardy's writers have been getting sloppier with their research lately, but I've noticed a couple of questions in the past few months where more than one answer would have been acceptable - which seems like kind of a no-no for a quiz show. Like if the Jumble letters were 'CDOLU' - it just doesn't work.

The first one I noticed was under the category 'change one letter', where the contestant is asked to come up with two words that are one letter apart and conform to the dictates of the 'answer'. This 'answer' was "Elmer's and Morose". I immediately hit the imaginary buzzer and exclaimed 'Glue and Blue!' I was already halfway through the self-congratulatory high-five when I realized that the correctly-answering contestant had given a different 'question': 'Glue and Glum'.

Chided, I wondered whether I would have been given the cash anyways, had I been on the show that day. I'm fairly certain that another episode, some weeks later, provided an affirmative answer to the problem.

The category: "Starts with A". The Answer: ~"5 Letters - a commonly-held wise saying". Again I jumped, this time with 'Axiom' - and I was proven right, but not before a contestant was told that their guess 'Adage' was incorrect. A post-commercial ruling by the judges overturned Trebek, which was all well and good, but this is the kind of sloppiness you don't expect to see from the good people at Jeopardy.

Which raises the question - are these imprecise 'answers' the result of a culture of inattention fostered by the dumbing-down of the show's questions? This is my suspicion, but unless I'm somehow contacted by a Whistleblower inside the Jeopardy organization, I fear I'll never learn the truth.

Still, there's always that genius robot to look forwards to, right?

(If this seems like a more digressive post than usual from me - and I'm aware that's saying something - it's because I've decided to attempt the One a Day Project, and as I sat down to write something about something, I found myself totally and utterly blocked - which is exact opposite of the point of this thing. So hopefully it looks up from here.)