- [Narrator] Pardon me, professor.
Maybe you can help me out here,
is this word pronounced cache or cache?
- Cache. - Appreciate it, doc.
You see, when Jacques Bailly pronounces a word,
he pronounces it right,
he can pronounce this thing.
- Smaradine.
- [Narrator] He can pronounce this thing.
- Scherenschnitte.
- [Narrator] He even pronounces words,
that don't make a lick of sense.
- Albumen.
- [Narrator] And when you're that damn good with words,
sooner or later, someone's gonna pay you to say 'em.
- Hi, Dr. Bailly.
- [Narrator] This is Jacques Bailly,
the official pronouncer of the National Spelling Bee.
- Luxembourg.
- [Boy] L-U-X-E.
(lively Western music)
- Gala.
Sherbet.
Gyro.
G-I-F.
- [Narrator] Before Jacques' days
as the world's foremost pronouncer of persnickety words,
he began a spelling career
on the other side of the microphone.
Jacques was a competitive speller
and in 1980, he found himself in the finals
of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
His word, elucubrate,
so he said.
- E-L-U-C-U-B-R-A-T-E
and it means to burn the midnight oil,
to study all night.
- [Narrator] And with those 10 letters,
Jacques became a champion.
Twenty-three years later, Jacques had elucubrated
all the way to the big show.
- Propiophenone.
Roquefort.
Pyroclastic.
- Can I please have the definition?
- [Narrator] But sometimes even Jacque's
meticulous pronunciations don't tell the whole story.
- English words are not always spelled as they sound.
One thing that makes English words really hard to spell
is the schwa,
the schwa is that uh, like in butter or unutterable.
- [Narrator] The Y in syringe,
the A in balloon,
the O in freedom,
they all sound the same spoken out loud,
a speller's nightmare.
- The longer and weirder a word is,
the easier it is to spell,
take the state fish of Hawaii, the humuhumunuku, ah,
the humuhumunukunukuapua'a,
that's an easy word to spell, it's just long,
it's a weird word and weird things stand out
and are easier to remember.
- O-N-O-M-A-S-I-A,
paronomasia. - Correct.
- Let's go!
(audience applauding)
- [Narrator] For a man with perhaps
the most legitimate claim as the authority on pronunciation,
Jacques takes a rather agnostic approach
to the right and wrong ways to say things.
- A lot of people are kind of amazed,
that I know how to pronounce all these words,
but I don't, I read them from the dictionary.
Well, how does the dictionary know how to pronounce a word?
Because they go out there and listen to native speakers,
if there are a whole bunch of people,
who pronounce a word a certain way,
that makes it a correct pronunciation.
People have very strong opinions,
that there's an incorrect way to pronounce a word,
but it's like saying that dog barked wrong,
that's not a bark, well, the dog gets to decide.
(barking dog)
- [Narrator] Thanks Jacques,
I reckon you got more wisdom,
than all the books in the library.
(light melodic music)