"Jeopardy!" host Ken Jennings dragged for mispronouncing this Canadian town (VIDEO)

Jan 17 2023, 5:41 pm

Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings is in hot water after he pronounced the name of a Nova Scotia town wrong.

Twitter user @Roscopcoletrain managed to capture the mispronunciation on video and posted it to the social media platform.

“Oh wow that Antigonish pronunciation,” he tweeted.

In the video, Jennings reads the following clue from the “Small town America and Canada” category:

“For more than 150 years, traditional festivities have come to Antigonish in this province for the annual highland games.”

Antigonish — a small town in Nova Scotia 160 km northeast of the province’s capital Halifax — is in fact home to the oldest continuous highland games outside of Scotland.

While the trivia was true, Nova Scotians took points away from the host for his mispronunciation.

“Somebody on @Jeopardy please tell Ken Jennings that Antigonish is pronounced AntigoNISH and not AntiGONish,” tweeted one person.

“Seriously, @KenJennings? AnTIGonish? No. Just no,” added another.

One person even went as far as to say that late Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek would be “very disappointed” in Jennings’ pronunciation.

Others were a little more forgiving.

“I’m a come-from-away but I’ve been here for over 30 years,” tweeted one person in defence of the host. “I still have to pause before I say some NS place names (Antigonish being one of them).”

And another Twitter user blamed the error on producers.

So, how do you pronounce Antigonish correctly?

According to one YouTuber, instead of emphasizing the “tig,” it should be said almost like “annie-guh-nish.”

A Reddit thread from two years ago pondered this same question, asking people to answer a poll.

“How do you pronounce Antigonish?” it asked Redditors. “There seems to be some inconsistency as to how this Nova Scotian town’s name is pronounced. How do you pronounce it as an individual?”

“Anigonish without the T” and “I pronounce it how it’s spelled” were the two top answers.

“I don’t pronounce the ‘T’ personally — ‘Anni-ga-nish,'” commented one person. “I find pronunciations all over the place across Nova Scotia though. Lots of insular communities that have developed their own dialects.”

Another person who said they were born and raised in Antigonish agreed that the pronunciation without the “t” is the most accurate.

Isabelle DoctoIsabelle Docto

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