Jacques Bailly

Jacques A. Bailly (born 1966)[1] serves as the Scripps National Spelling Bee's official pronouncer, a position he has held since 2003.[2] He was the 1980 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion.


Early life and Education

Bailly grew up in the Denver, Colorado area. He began participating in spelling bees in sixth grade, training with a nun at his Catholic school.[2] He reached the National Spelling Bee as an eighth grader and won with the word elucubrate.[3]

Bailly studied Ancient Greek and Latin, receiving his bachelor's degree from Brown University and his PhD from Cornell University.[4] He learned German in Switzerland with the help of a Fulbright scholarship.[2] In 1990, he wrote a letter to the National Spelling Bee organizers offering his services and was hired as an associate pronouncer.[5] Bailly became the Bee's chief pronouncer after Alex Cameron's death in 2003.[2]

Career

Bailly works full-time as an associate professor of classics at the University of Vermont, specializing in Greek and Roman philosophy, particularly Plato.[2][6]

Personal Life

Bailly portrayed himself in the 2006 film Akeelah and the Bee, which tells the story of a girl who competes in the National Spelling Bee.[2]

Bailly is married to Leslyn Hall. They have two children, Isidora (b. 2001) and Jean-Pierre (b. 2003).[7]

gollark: For example, just adding two numbers seems simple, but it isn't really. What if (in a weakly typed language), one is an integer and one is a floating-point number? What if one is infinity? What about floating point inaccuracy issues (if you are using those)? What about integer overflow (or underflow)?
gollark: You want to test the weird edge cases your function might have in case changing it somehow makes it do the wrong thing.
gollark: I look forward to data analysis all being rewritten in trendy Node.js with MongoDB.
gollark: One would hope so. If I cared about ordering of data and stuff I would just use SQLite or something myself.
gollark: Relying on specific filesystem ordering seems kind of a silly thing to do generally.

See also

References
  1. "Jacques Bailly 1966 - Public Background Checks". publicbackgroundchecks.com. Retrieved June 10, 2015.
  2. James Maguire. American Bee: the National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds. Rodale, 2006. 121-124.
  3. "Denver boy wins spelling bee". The Ledger. May 30, 1980. 5.
  4. http://www.uvm.edu/~classics/documents/JacquesBaillyResume_Aug2010.pdf
  5. M.J. Stephey. "Q&A: Spelling Bee Pronouncer Jacques Bailly". Time. May 26, 2009. Retrieved on August 4, 2009.
  6. Department of Classics. University of Vermont. Retrieved on June 5, 2010.
  7. JABcv2014. JABcv2014. Retrieved on May 31, 2017.
Preceded by
Katie Kerwin McCrimmon		 Scripps National Spelling Bee winner
1980		 Succeeded by
Paige Pipkin
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.