Inclusive language
The debate: All hell broke loose in French political discourse when people found out in November that the gender-neutral pronoun iel had been added to the online version of the Petit Robert, one of the leading dictionaries for la langue de Molière.
French doesn’t have neutral pronouns and uses masculine pronouns to refer, for example, to a group made up of men and women. Iel is a pretty recent creation and comes from contracting il and elle. It’s an alternative to masculine pronouns and can refer to people who identify as non-binary. But it’s hardly used outside feminist and LGBTQ+ communities — the Petit Robert acknowledges it’s a “rare” word — partly because a third, neutral grammatical gender causes headaches when applied to a language as heavily gendered as French.
The Petit Robert’s move prompted MP François Jolivet, backed up by Education Minister (and anti-woke crusader) Jean-Michel Blanquer, to write a letter to the Académie Française, the body of sword-wielding, Francophone intellectuals in charge of regulating the language. The addition is “an ideological intrusion,” Jolivet wrote, “probably announcing the advent of the ‘woke ideology’ that is destroying our very own values.” First Lady Brigitte Macron also weighed in, saying: “The French language is so beautiful. And two pronouns are good.”
If you want to spice up the argument: Bring up other “gender-inclusive writing” initiatives, such as the middle dot (·) to challenge the use of masculine grammatical gender in collective nouns.
If you want to cool things down: Bring both a Petit Robert and a Larousse to the Scrabble game.
COVID-19 measures
The debate: Millions of French people have been getting swabs stuck up their noses ahead of the holidays, with pharmacies across the country selling six times as many self-testing kits as they were a month ago, the Journal du Dimanche reported. But as the Omicron variant injects a dose of uncertainty into festivities across the Continent, the looming threat of postprandial sanitary restrictions will certainly heat up.
Dining and Cooking