How Do You Spell Pride in French? C’est la Bee

It was a cold but radiant weekend here, the nicest so far this winter. The boulevards of the Right Bank were mobbed with people enticed by post-New Year’s sales.

So why did hundreds choose to spend a glorious afternoon indoors, sunk in the same red velvet seats at the Olympia music hall where audiences have listened to the likes of Liza Minnelli and Jacques Brel? The improbable answer is what for Americans is kid stuff: a national spelling championship.

For 15 years, host Bernard Pivot’s televised linguistic brainteaser, which aired Sunday, has been a French cultural event. Watched in hundreds of thousands of households in this country, it is also beamed by satellite to other French-speaking lands, from the Canadian province of Quebec to the islands of Polynesia, and is posted on the Internet as well (at https://www.dicosdor.com).

Now spoken by only about 2% of the world’s population, French is under continuous threat from the English-dominated World Wide Web, Hollywood and Madison Avenue--or so many of the French believe. Pivot’s contest has become a modest but valued counteroffensive against these Anglo-Saxon influences, and a reminder to the French of the riches of their own tongue.

The broadcast’s sponsors, which include dictionary publisher Larousse, a Paris-based bank and a government-owned TV channel, contend that it has grown into the single most important event devoted to the French language.

Each year, Pivot, the suave and erudite emcee of France’s most popular literary talk show, concocts a text studded with grammatical pitfalls, arcane vocabulary, humor and double meanings. The text, known in French as a dictee, is then read aloud, and contestants, who range from young children to retirees, do their best to transcribe it.

For an outsider, Pivot’s broadcast, the “Dicos d’Or,” is an opportunity to attempt to understand the singular relationship that the people of France enjoy with their language. “The French confuse the ability to speak good French with intelligence,” a high-ranking U.S. diplomat stationed here once opined.

As they sipped free champagne before the dictee, contestants and guests agreed unanimously that a politician like President-elect George W. Bush, who has had problems saying what he means, could never win office here, whatever his other qualities.

Likewise, no French author has, like Mark Twain, ever conjectured that a writer’s merit was inversely proportional to his ability to spell. Perhaps only in a country where a youngster’s test-taking ability can determine the course of his entire life would grown-ups vie for the honor--the only tangible prizes given by Pivot are reference books--of finishing first in the same sort of didactic exercise they had to engage in at school.

To be present this weekend, one 15-year-old boy from Brest in the far west of France got up at 4 a.m. to take a plane. The youngest candidate was an 11-year-old girl. An adult contestant, a retired doctor, said he had been boning up on his vocabulary since 1987 in hopes of winning. “I read dictionaries the way you read novels,” one past laureate confessed.

“We have the feeling that the French language is living through difficult hours,” Helene Carrere d’Encausse, “perpetual secretary” of the Academie Francaise, the bastion of linguistic purity, told winners of this year’s dictee. “When I see the efforts you are making, I say thank you. The horizons are clearing. Thanks to people like you, I see that French is not threatened and that the French language will live a long time in splendor.”

In an interview, Carrere d’Encausse, a specialist on Russian history, said she had made five errors in duplicating Pivot’s text. (This reporter, who has studied French since junior high school, made 17.) Pivot confessed to experiencing a “perverse” pleasure in devising the dictee, which took him three days.

The treacherous test, supposedly a collective recollection by the chairs at the Olympia, the most famous music hall in Paris, included the U.S. import showbiz, used in French since the mid-1950s. There was also a rare adjective of Greek origin, callipyge, a classical way of saying someone has a shapely derriere. Fully 61.4% of the 209 finalists muffed that.

Half a million French schoolchildren took earlier spelling tests to qualify for the finals, as did more than 15,000 adults. Some cultural luminaries also turned up to submit themselves to the final exam, including jazz musician Claude Bolling, novelist Yves Berger and crooner Gilbert Becaud, the warmup act when the Olympia opened in 1954.

How to explain the durability of Pivot’s broadcast?

“It’s at the limit of the boring,” said Line Avezard, who helps organize preliminaries for schoolchildren in the rural Ardeche district, 300 miles south of Paris. “And yet it’s watched by entire families, pen or pencil in hand.”

So is all right with French for another year? This weekend, Romain Santi, 13, of Vitry-sur-Oise emerged as the champion in the youngest of six groups of finalists, with only 2 1/2 mistakes. (Such minor errors as using an incorrect accent count as half a mistake.) Among the adults, five turned in perfect papers.

“Magnificent!” Pivot exclaimed.

On the other hand, the domestic audience for his broadcast has gone into decline. From 2.6 million people in 1999, it shrank to 2.2 million last year, about a quarter of the number who watch the French version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” This year, for the first time, the dictee was taped the previous day and broadcast not in Saturday prime time but on Sunday afternoon. Pivot said he hoped the new slot would boost family viewership.