Cold sweats on the beach.
Until now we knew the children's holiday notebook.
The pedagogical interest that it presents for schoolchildren in the summer period is no longer to be proven.
Similarly, its version intended for adults contains useful exercises to consolidate what you have learned and enrich your knowledge between two swims.
On the other hand, we did not yet know the deconstructed notebook.
For the second consecutive year, the participatory online media Sorocité publishes its "Feminist vacation notebook" (Les Insolentes).
A 96-page book with a committed approach to traditional school subjects.
The objective:
"to give women weapons to fight against our patriarchal society in a light way"
, explained to Challenges Charlotte Arce, co-founder of the media.
Thus, between tests and games, opening the history section implies thinking about the “scam of our
prehistoric
origins” .
Go to the chapter of natural sciences to learn the composition of
"male tears"
-
"male tears"
.
And leafing through a dictionary of Anglicisms from the feminist lexical field is supposed to enrich our French.
The learning doesn't stop there.
Unorthodox if any, the notebook also offers a series of exercises dedicated to the proper use of inclusive writing, supposed to
"restore the place of the feminine gender in the French language and include non-binary people in the discourse."
Use of the midpoint, the pronoun
"iel" , respect for the so-called
"proximity"
rule
... Everything is there to begin the dictation closing the chapter.
A dictation intended to be sponsored by Bernard Pivot - his portrait serves as an illustration on the page.
However, the journalist and cantor of beautiful French letters, who for years hosted Les dictées de Bernard Pivot on television, described inclusive writing in these terms, in 2017:
“This tinkering, this tinkering, this scribbling, this tampering with the language.”
A bold choice
It is with the help of the rules learned on the previous page that it is advisable to reflect on this dictation.
The exercise is not easy.
It is a question of correcting, according to the grammatical principles stated, a passage from chapter IX of George Orwell's novel 1984, of which here is an extract:
"The new aristocracy was made up, for the most part, of bureaucrats, scholars , technicians, union organizers, advertising experts, sociologists, professors, journalists and professional politicians.”
The solution to this dictation is to transform the word
“savants”
into
“savant.es”
,
“techniciens”
into
“technicien.nes”
, And so on.
However, a dark side remains on the way to rewrite
“organizers”
, the correction of this single word not appearing at the end of the notebook.
Published in 1949,
1984
is written in a context where the author observes an impoverishment of the English language.
In his novel of anticipation, the totalitarian regime of Oceania, which Orwell imagines, imposes
"Newspeak"
, a language encouraging binary reasoning - not being for something necessarily means opposing it.
His goal: to annihilate thought.
However,
“what matters above all, said Orwell, is that the meaning governs the choice of words, and not the reverse.”
Inclusive writing, on the other hand, is imbued with an ideology that
"strives to permanently denounce the alleged stranglehold of the patriarchy on the uses of the French language, and to claim the visibility, in private and institutional exchanges, of the community uses of the language"
, as deciphered for
Le Figaro
Franck Neveu, professor of French linguistics.
Therefore, choosing this book for a dictation of this kind is daring, in the sense that it denounces what the holiday notebook strives to defend.
The systematic deconstruction of knowledge, notably through the deformation of language.
Also, he strives to recall, the latter remains
“not approved by the French Academy”
.
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