Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! Read Online Free PDF Page A

or index finger against a small white button on a black plastic cylinder, hoping that Alex will call your name and useful noises will spill out of your mouth.
    The term “ringing in” is a vestige of a long-ago period when hitting your button made an electronic noise— boong, to be exact. It’s not called “buzzing in” because nothing in the game goes “buzz.”
    If you’ve already noticed that nothing goes ring or boong anymore either, then you are a troublemaker, and I will have to keep my eye on you. Unfortunately, there’s no verb that fits much better. Clicking, tapping, punching, zapping—nothing quite works. There’s just no common verb that sufficiently describes competitive red-hot thumb-on-button action. Clearly, the English language is a wuss.
    There isn’t even a thrilling name for the cylinder-button-whackity-thingy itself. Most players call it a buzzer, although the preferred, official term seems to be ( anticlimax alert! ) the “Signaling Device.”
    But “Signaling Device” isn’t a name. It’s a placeholder for where a name should go. Anything can be a “Signaling Device”: road flares, pheromones, a discharge of ignited fuel from a shuttlecraft, even the body of a dead guy. (This was in a Die Hard movie.) “Signaling Device” is so ambiguous you could rewrite a 1930s melodrama around the phrase, with complete accuracy:

Woman:
Say…This (signaling device) on your collar isn’t my shade…
Man:
Um, sure it is, honey. Stand where the (signaling device) is better—
Woman:
Liar! You’ve taken up with that cheap (signaling device) again!
Man:
Wait! What are you doing with that (signaling device)?
—BANG—

    You might have noticed your own active—perhaps even lurid—imagination just now. We’ll soon put it to use. Harnessed properly, it’s the single fastest way to hot-rivet new info into your skull, not to mention a lot of fun. Just realize that I had little to do with whatever your filthy little mind came up with just now. You sick (signaling device).
    Hoping to improve on “Signaling Device,” I once sought the opinion of an expert in product-naming. We spent a whole afternoon kidding about it, in fact, while drinking champagne in bed and watching tapes of the show.
    Jane, who will become a major character later, and in whose apartment all of my personal belongings now sit silently in boxes and bags (and have sat long enough that they are now covered in dust), received an M.A. in linguistics from Berkeley and once made her living inventing evocative trade names.
    Many of the products Jane helped name are now quite famous, although there were confidentiality agreements involved, so I am forbidden to divulge details. Even now. So let’s just say this: if you’ve ever heard of a lightly carbonated alcoholic beverage whose name rhymes with “Squeema”…wink wink, nudge nudge.
    This was our list of alternative names for the Signaling Device:
     
     
     
ClueZapper
Palm Hoopty
Thumbilical Cord
Thought Bopper
ThunderFist, now with realistic Kung Fu Grip
QuizBang
Mr. Smartyhands
Blurt-O-Matic Jr.
The Mervulator
Toyota Corolla
     
     
     
    And the one we decided on, since it’s closest to the actual user experience:
     
     
     
The Jeopardy Weapon
     
     
     
    Jane and I laughed a lot making that list. Sometimes even in the instant you’re doing something, you’re aware it’s a moment you’ll want to hang on to forever.
    Moving on. I’m calling it a buzzer. Everybody does anyway.
     
      
     

     
      
     
    Back in the green room, hours after rehearsal and shortly before my first game, I was having trouble breathing.
    I was sitting in a makeup chair, near a live set, on a soundstage inside the Sony lot, about to go on national TV. I was just trying to control my nerves and stay focused. I had spent much of the day secretly expecting to do something idiotic, possibly dishonoring my family before millions of people.
    And now, only moments before I would play, my head was on