Disappearance
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From 1985 to 2005, with his “Dicos d’or”, the host, who died on Monday, May 6 at the age of 89, became the black hussar of the whole of France by sending texts as heavy as the show was praised.
We admit that we participated and there is still somewhere, gathering dust, the 1991 Petit Larousse that rewarded our (not so poor) performance. The college sent what it considered its best representatives to a lecture hall at the local university. It was only the semi-final, we stopped there, dictionary in hand, defeated, in our memory, by the disobedient “traps”.
That was Pivot’s dictation (actually, it was called Golden Dicos, but who remembers it under this name?), mobilization all over France, in clubs, associations, schools, until the final in which the host played (more than dictated) a caricaturally impossible text interspersed with old French phrases and unknown words. The last stage, therefore, broadcast from the great amphitheater of the Sorbonne, the hemi-cluse of the National Assembly (it was in 1993, MPs were invited to participate) or even the Stade de France, was broadcast live throughout the French-speaking world and beyond (1), bringing together dozens thousands of official candidates (only a few hundred competed for the title in the amphitheater), and millions of unofficial ones, with pen in hand on Saturdays at 1 p.m., at roast chicken time (for the answer, see you after the news at 8 p.m.).
Ridicule was torture for many
The idea, however, was not his. A Brussels linguist suggested this to one of Pivot’s collaborators