Recent puzzle: Same answer, three reasons

I just saw an episode where the final puzzle seemed to be pretty poorly planned, in that there were three equally valid reasons to arrive at the correct answer. (The answer is the same in all three cases, so it didn't actually affect the outcome...there were just two other reasons why the correct answer "worked" in addition to the show's explanation.)

The question was "Logically, which word below doesn't belong?" And on the screen were the following eight words:

CROSS CHECK
TAKE TIME
PLAY DATE
SPACE CADET

Each word also had a visual "echo" of itself behind the word, which was a clue to the show's explanation...the fact that each word was "doubled" was supposed to hint that all of the words form a phrase with the word "double" ("double-cross," "double-check," etc.) except for "cadet."

However, before Ben revealed the show's explanation for the solution, I figured out two other reasons why "cadet" was the word that didn't belong. The simplest reason is that "cadet" is the only two-syllable word out of all of them. If that's too simple, I also realized that all of the words except "cadet" can be used as either nouns or verbs.

The kicker is that both players chose "cadet" and got the puzzle right...but they didn't actually figure out a solution, they just picked it randomly because time was running out. I would have loved it if they had explained their choice with either the syllable-count or the noun/verb reasoning, just to see what Ben would have said. "That wasn't what we were going for, but that actually makes sense!"


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"Little do they know how little I know about the little there is to know." - Neddy Seagoon