The "how" of "Jeopardy" host Alex Trebek's pronunciation is fairly unremarkable, but the "why" reveals a bit more about America's favorite man of trivia.

The show doesn't do "rehearsals" in the normal sense, of course -- the contestants can't have seen the questions before being taped or it would ruin the whole thing.

However, in an interview with AskMen.com, Trebek said he spends about an hour and a half alone going over the questions and answers ahead of taping, so that he'll know the answers and, presumably, to practice any tricky pronunciations.

He is a professional, after all. He hosted a few other game shows and was a news broadcaster before settling into his most famous gig.

But he admits that getting the pronunciations right is a sort of obsession of his, and he says it has to do with his childhood.

His mother was French-Canadian, but his father could only speak English -- that meant Trebek grew up (in Sudbury, Ont., by the way) speaking both languages in the house.

It gave him a care for language that he brought with him to the show. But the nature of the show itself figures in as well.

"I'm the host of a show that deals with bright people. It would not look good for the host to be mispronouncing words. So, if contestants mispronounce words, I will not correct them; I will just say, 'Yes,' and give the correct pronunciation right after," he told AskMen.com. "I do not want to put the contestants down, but I want to indicate to people that this would be the correct pronunciation of the word."

And if this sounds like stuffiness on his part, most argue it's not. A profile of the host in the "Washington Post" said that, "Even off-camera, he talks in his soothing-yet-stilted hosting voice, but endears himself to the audience with his affability and his sharing of personal mundanities."

That's a stuffy way of saying he's a nice guy.

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