Mark B wrote:"In 1965 this African American with an alliterative name won the singles & doubles college tennis titles"
My initial reaction to this clue was that "Arthur Ashe" isn't alliterative but assonant. Grammarians?
What's a grammarian going to tell you? There aren't any grammatical errors in the clue.
My answer as an English major and language geek is that it isn't assonant, but it's more or less alliterative.
I wouldn't call "Arthur Ashe" assonant because the vowel sounds are not similar enough. If his name were "Arthur Ox", that would be an assonance (even more so if you weren't a rhotic sort).
As for alliteration, it depends how tightly you want to define the term. Jeopardy!'s definition is somewhat loose, but not as loose as it could be. A tighter definition would require that the initial sounds be either assonant or consonant--involving a correspondence of same or similar vowel or consonant sounds. By that definition, I wouldn't consider "Arthur Ashe" alliterative. And I think "status symbol"--which J! called "alliterative" last season on Feb 23--is pushing it a little.
On the other hand, in Old English alliterative verse, the rule was that all vowels alliterate together. So not only is "Arthur Ashe" alliterative, so is "Arthur Ox" and "evil undertaker's aide". While this definition still has its current uses, Jeopardy! wisely avoids pushing the issue. Their rule on vowels seems to be that the initial letters have to be the same and have to to make
some sort of vowel sound. Hence, "electric eel" was described as "alliterative" on 7-20-2010, as was "Amy Adams" on 3-19-2010.
So Jeopardy!'s rule on vowels is they don't have to sound the same, they just have to
be the same. Their rule on consonants is exactly the reverse. Hence, "jungle-gym" was described as alliterative on 7-8-2011 despite j being a different letter from g. But "Ptolemy's peculiar philosophical psyche" would not be, despite the initial p's.
This may seem inconsistent, but I don't think it is. In essence, they're using the looser, Old English, definition but selectively avoiding those examples that involve different initial vowel letters. This corresponds to the popular understanding of "alliteration" and avoids controversy. Mostly.
EDIT: I didn't properly close the italics around the word "be" when I composed the above some 2 years, 7 months ago. That's taken care of now. Mostly I just wanted to prove to myself that it actually was possible to edit something so far in the past. (Will this now show up as an unread post?) If this works, I'll go through all my old posts to edit out typos, clarify ambiguities, and improve my predictions.