Bernard’s dictation
Update: The contest is over, and Alexia and Élodie have won the prize. But you can still try the dictation for fun!
It will not have escaped your notice that we are celebrating Monsieur Bernard Pivot‘s birthday today, with great festivity and fanfare.
Famous for his literary programs such as Apostrophes and Bouillon de Culture, Bernard Pivot is best known to our generation as the ultimate grammarian torturer, whose abuse of amphigoric dictation has plunged many an innocent youngster into drugs and alcoholism, insofar as they were revealed with ferocious acuity all the inanity of their lives, unable as they were to write “bearded vulture” without making a lamentable mistake.
But no, we’re not holding a grudge at Bernard Forever. In fact, we’re even taking this opportunity to don the hangman’s noose ourselves, by offering you Bernard Forever’s dictation, a short dictation in tribute to the Disco d’or1.
If you’d like to play along, 2 winners will be drawn from the best entries to receive a prize pack of 4 tattoos. Entries can be submitted until 3:42pm on May 11. Please bring your own blotting paper.
The results
And yes, the Bernard Forever dictation is over. Many of you took part, even more than we had anticipated. Many thanks to you all!
And the entries were very well received, with an overall class average of 17.1/20, with a maximum of 5 faults, even if none of you managed to score zero!
With a score of 19/20, Alexia and Élodie won the Bernard Forever dictation prize, with the congratulations of the jury.
- View the answers and pitfalls to avoid
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Answer key
It’s in our blood
Among all the faces and figures that shape the human race, there’s one so colorful and so dear to our hearts: that of the Bernard. By turns finicky, polite and hermit-like, the Bernard is for many a faithful and loyal friend. If we’d had to list all his qualities, we’d have spent countless hours on him, with devotion and self-sacrifice. We’ll never stop singing his praises.
The traps
Among the most common errors is the recurrent omission of the circumflex accent on the u in ” Eût-il fallu “: this was an imperfect subjunctive and not an anterior past tense. Here’s the trick: to determine whether or not to use the accented spelling, use the plural :
eurent-ils: past tense, no accent ;
would have: imperfect subjunctive, accent.Overzealousness has also led some of you to put a circumflex accent on the u of “dussions”. In the conjugation of the verb devoir, the circumflex, which is used on the masculine singular past participle, is used as a diacritical mark (i.e. to distinguish two homographs), to avoid confusion with the determiner du. The form “que nous dussions” does not present this type of ambiguity.
But the real difficulty of this dictation lies in its last sentence, which, in addition to the embarrassment of an archaic turn of phrase, adds a cunningly-placed incise, forcing you to fully grasp the logical construction of the sentence so as not to stumble over the trap of homophony et/est. In a nutshell. A very vicious and totally unfair trap that has caused many to fall.
Finally, we’d like to point out one last trap that wasn’t a trap at all: “ermite ” is, of course, a muddy pun on Bernard l’Hermite, so both spellings were equally relevant and didn’t result in any points being deducted.
Once again, our heartfelt thanks to all the participants. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!
1 More of a junior level, because, well, not everyone is Bernard Pivot or Micheline Sommant.
Dictation
For those who’d like to try their hand at it, here’s Bernard Forever’s dictation.
Real men will know how to do it without resorting to the above answer key…