“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, or had misunderstood it.
A French teacher, Domitille Rivière, pointed out in Le Figaro student that in their language the adjective "fun" came back more.
Should we be worried about it?
Not according to lexicologist Jean Pruvost, interviewed by AFP, for whom playful "is not 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 “guessed the meaning”.
“Unacceptable” threats
“But there are not so many words of the same family!
The ludion, and it stops there,” he says, referring to an Etruscan participant in the circus games in Rome.
“And then when I passed the baccalaureate, we were 14% [of a class of age] to have it.
Today, 90%”, points out the doctor in linguistics.
“It's a call to do vocabulary in class.
The teaching of Latin and Greek roots, without learning these languages, is devilishly lacking”, he underlines.
“The child who doesn't understand the word playful, if we explain it to him and then he knows it, he's happy!
It's unimaginable how much fun students have in learning words."
Jean Pruvost
As soon as the controversy subsided, a bucolic text by the novelist Sylvie Germain was offered to comment on at the French baccalaureate.
On Twitter again, many candidates attacked him, some violently: the extract having been deemed "too complicated".
“It is serious that students who arrive towards 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.
Condemning “unacceptable” threats, Jean Pruvost moderates: they are in the minority.
"It won't be so bad if some are brought to discover Sylvie Germain."
According to him, it would be a question of putting an end to a very French paradox.
"When you spell badly, or you don't know a word, you are misjudged," he concedes.
But “you don't dare say to your friend, to your neighbour: you don't say compensate for something, you say compensate for something.
And if no one tells us, we can continue to blame for a long time!”
And “it is absolutely necessary that at school, college, high school and university, we consider that nothing is ever acquired.
It's a lifetime that we will progress in spelling.
And it's not that hard,” he insists.
“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,” says this retired teacher.
