“In your opinion, is the game still fun?” This was the statement of the French test for the professional baccalaureate in mid-June. Stupor and dismay among some final year students: they confided on Twitter that they did not know the word “playful”or had misunderstood it. A French teacher, Domitille Rivière, pointed out in Le Figaro student that in their language the adjective “fun”.
In my 40 line essay I just said that playful means dangerous, I was totally off topic #Bac2022 #playful #Bacpro2022 #BAC pro
— Lilgooldd (@lilgooldd) June 14, 2022
“It doesn’t necessarily worry me”confides the lexicologist Jean Pruvost for whom playful “isn’t a word obviously”. He himself does not remember at what age he learned it. Latin being taught much more massively in his time, in the 1960s, he would have “guess the meaning”. “But there are not so many words from the same family! The ludion, and it stops there”he says, in reference to an Etruscan participant in the circus games in Rome.
As soon as the controversy subsided, a text by the novelist Sylvie Germain, full of rural vocabulary and relatively rare words, was offered to comment on in the general French baccalaureate. On Twitter again, many candidates attacked him, some violently: the text was too complicated. “It’s serious that students who reach the end of their schooling can show so much immaturity, and hatred of the language, of the effort of reflection”replied the author, via Le Figaro student.
sylvie germain her text it was broken I didn’t understand anything #Bac2022 #BacFrancais
— ines (@iinessd) June 16, 2022
condemning threats “unacceptable”Jean Pruvost moderates: they are in the minority. “It won’t be so bad if some are led to discover Sylvie Germain”he adds.
It would be, according to him, to put an end to a very French paradox. “When you spell badly, or you don’t know a word, you are misjudged”, he concedes. But “We don’t dare tell our friend, our neighbour: we don’t say make up for something, we say make up for something. And if no one tells us, we can go on making mistakes for a long time!” The retired teacher also believes that “the child who does not understand the word playful, if we explain it to him and then he knows it, he is happy! It’s unimaginable the pleasure students have in learning words.”.
“It’s a call for vocabulary to be done in the classroom. Teaching Latin and Greek roots, without learning those languages, is devilishly lacking.“, he points out. He remembers a lesson where he listed the roots that have come down to us from ancient languages. “We had seen among other hemi, half, and cephalic, head. Afterwards, in the hallway, a 5th grade student had called the other a hemicephalus! It was great, she was playing.”
The retired professor insists on the importance of long-term work: “It is absolutely necessary that at school, college, high school and university, we consider that nothing is ever acquired. It is a lifetime that we will progress in spelling. is not that difficult”, he insists.
Jean Pruvost offered his services to be one of the “immortals” of the French Academy, who are writing a very ambitious, but also highly criticized dictionary. His candidacy was rejected twice, in favor of the novelist Chantal Thomas and then of another lexicographer, Antoine Compagnon. These failures did not alter either his good humor or his faith in the future of the French language.