Paris (AFP)

"Soul" of Le Robert dictionaries, Alain Rey, who died in Paris on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday at the age of 92, dusted off lexicography, giving life and color to words and considering his "dicos" as observatories, and not conservatories, of the French language.

Long white hair, mustache, striped shirts and colorful ties, this little man with the allure of Professor Calculus was both a scholar and an adventurer of vocabulary, willingly facetious.

Linguist, philosopher of language, with no other diploma than a degree in letters and a certificate of higher studies in art history, he was closer to the earthy Rabelais (1494-1553) than to the classic Malherbe (1555-1628) , obsessed with the purity of the language.

He was for years a columnist on France Inter with "Le mot de la fin", on France 2 with "Démo des mots" and often invited to the Petit Journal of Canal +.

He published, in addition to the Le Robert dictionaries (collective works, he underlined), about thirty books on language.

Among these, appear "Dictionary in love with dictionaries", "The French, a language that defies the centuries", "Dictionary in love with the Devil", biographies of Littré and Furetière, essays on theater and comics.

He has also written numerous articles in linguistics, literary criticism (in the Literary Magazine), semiotics.

- "Large + Métisserie +" -

"We impoverish the language by wanting to purify it", he wrote in "L'amour du français / Against the purists and other censorship of the language" (2007), reaching out "to those who, from Rabelais to Céline, from baroque writers to modern terminologists, have contributed to its most precious virtues: its richness and its mobility ".

Speaking of "grande + métisserie", he insisted on the creolization from which French results (spoken Latin, Celtic, German) and on the constant contribution of external elements (Italian, Spanish, etc.).

"Le Petit Robert wants to fight the interested and backward pessimism of aggressive purisms like the soft indifference of laxity. French deserves it", he noted in an afterword to Le Petit Robert 2007.

Alain Rey was interested in regional languages, in slang and, against the French Academy, defended the feminization of trade names.

Maurice Druon, former perpetual secretary of the institution, accused him of "picking up words in the stream".

It was easy to agree that his dictionaries were never intended to say the correct use of the language, which belongs only to the "Immortals".

For him, words bear witness to changes in practices and changes in mores.

"When the term 'selfie' comes back millions of times, we can't pretend it doesn't exist. But that sometimes creates controversy," he admitted in 2015.

On the spelling, his positions made some jump because he estimated that, often, "the fault of today is the norm of tomorrow".

- A weakness for "smileys" -

Yet he was not a blissful "modern".

For example, he hated "passivity anglicisms" (when one did not try to give an equivalent), wrote by hand, had a cell phone but did not send an SMS.

That said, he liked "smileys": "it's a return to pictography, a condition prior to writing proper".

In 2016, he had published a new edition of his Historical Dictionary of the French Language, full of humor and erudition, in which he was happy to "snatch" - a word unfortunately little used which means "to put in mush "- the" spoiler "and other" burn out ".

Alain Rey was born on August 30, 1928 in Pont-du-Château (Puy-de-Dôme) where the library has been named after him since 2007. His father, a polytechnician, was commercial director.

After passing through the Sorbonne, he performed his military service among the Tunisian riflemen.

In 1952, he responded to an advertisement published in Le Monde: a certain Paul Robert, then a lawyer, wanted to launch an alphabetical dictionary.

He is engaged.

From 1964, it is he who directs the dictionaries of the young publishing house, which will later be great successes such as "Le Petit Robert", "Le Grand Robert" (9 volumes), "Le Dictionnaire historique de the French language "or" The Cultural Dictionary in the French language "(4 volumes).

Winner of numerous awards, he has taught in the United States (in Indiana) and at the Sorbonne.

Alain Rey was married to the great lexicographer and semiologist Josette Rey-Debove, pillar of Le Robert editions, who died in 2005. The couple had no children.

He remarried in 2008 with Danièle Morvan, another director of the publishing house which, all his life, was his public and private anchorage.

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