Elimination competitions

[mtbc]

Many television reality competitions have a format where they start with many contestants and eliminate one-ish each episode. Once we get to the last small handful, we hold the final.

One thing that surprised me at first but seems commonplace is the idea that the semifinal is before the final, then before that is the quarterfinal, etc. I can understand that in two-contestant-trial knockout matches, as one can find in some tournaments between sports teams. Then, the teams in the quarterfinals are in the final for a quarter of the teams, the teams in the semfinals are in the final for half (semi) of the teams, etc. However, this model doesn't fit the current reality shows at all.

Perhaps my reasoning fits the original meaning, then the typical thing happened where a precise word was broadened into becoming rather less useful. Or, I was just mistaken from the start.

Comments

[fred_mouse]

I'm not following your description, so I'm going to rephrase to what I think you are meaning. When we are talking competitions (whether teams or individuals), the quarterfinals have four 'matches', with the winners going forward to the semi-finals, which then have two 'matches', the winners of which then go on to the final. But that reality televisions shows do something else, but use the words, so that the third last episode is named the quarter final, even if there are not 8 contestants in 4 1-on-1 matches? And then the penultimate episode is called the semi-final, regardless of how many contestants remain from the previous episode or the selection?

Which yes, does feel weird as a generalisation now that I've written it out like that. But I can also see that using language that is familiar but Not Quite Right probably makes what they are doing an accessible way to ramp up the intensity. Alternatively, it is that 'final episode' fits into the meaning of final in a normal way, but that sportsball has narrowed the meaning.

I had not stopped to think about this before, that was an interesting bit of language to engage with.

[mtbc]

Yes, I wasn't the clearest, thank you for explaining. Also that, for things like knockout sportsball tournaments and such, of the whole set of teams competing, it is each quarterfinal that determines which team wins from among a quarter of that whole set.

[vyvyanx]

In snooker (which is the sport I am most familiar with and interested in) this language of halves and quarters is used quite explicitly: commentators will say things like "Let's look at the top half of the draw" with reference to the half of the players who are in principle able to reach one of the semifinals, or "He's in a much tougher quarter of the draw than the other top seeds". The draw will often be shown visually as well, as a tree narrowing down to the final on the RHS, preceded by the two semis and the four quarterfinals.

But yes, in things like Bake Off or Pottery Throw Down or Sewing Bee you have a very different structure, with typically 12 players at the start, one lost each episode, and three being left in the final, so that you have a ten-episode series. By analogy with knockout competitions, the episode before the final is called the semifinal, and the one before that the quarterfinal. Masterchef has an even more elaborate and linguistically curious approach: there are several weeks of multi-episode heats, each ending in a "quarterfinal" episode; then there is a "knockout" week which whittles the survivors of the heats down a bit; then a "semifinal" week and a "finals" week, each containing multiple episodes. The very last episode, at the end of finals week, is sometimes called the "grand final" to distinguish it!

[fred_mouse]

Oh wow! I have paid almost not attention to reality TV, and that sounds very confusing.

[mtbc]

That's certainly inventive, thank you for the summary! I'd not followed Masterchef for very many years so I hadn't realized.

My father watched snooker so perhaps it makes sense for me to feel rather aware of the what the words may mean in that regard. I still like watching snooker but it's more a case of if it happens to be on and I want to kill some time gently (and the sports betting advertising is now a bit in-one's-face). I rather miss the past workplace where my typical Friday afternoon included my playing a colleague in the campus' nice snooker room, we were equally bad at it.

[andrewducker]

Clearly it should be the Antefinal and Preantefinal.

[fred_mouse]

I would like to suggest the alternative of semi-final and demi-semi-final, which also allows for the hemi-demi-semi-final (which I may have in the wrong order; it is a long time since I have had to remember the order of those)

[mtbc]

That sounds a capital idea.