More Herzog's Principle

[dr_whom]

Following up on an earlier post, today's Jeopardy! category "Homophones" contained the following clue:

"The leader of a Mafia crime family, or sunrise".

(It also had the clue "The state of the atmosphere, or a conjunction indicating an alternative", for those of you who prefer more-nearly-complete mergers.)

There was another clue in some other category whose correct response was "What is a bison?", but let me tell you, if Rochester had been in charge of editing today's clues he never would have let those homophone ones slip by.

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

i'd forgotten what ‘conjunction’ meant in traditional grammar, so i couldn't figure out what that one was talking about until somebody explained it in your facebook comments. as somebody who does semantics of question embedding, i also think it's a little hasty to characterize its function as ‘indicating an alternative’.

[midnight-sidhe.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was baffled by that one until I read this comment.

[dr_whom]

To be fair, I may have misremembered the question; it's not up on the J-archive yet.

[pastwatcher]

I thought "don" just meant "lord" in Italian.