Counting Coup

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Amanda, and I’m calling from Indianapolis.

Hi, Amanda.

I had a question about the phrase counting coup.

Counting coup.

Counting coup.

What’s on your mind?

So there’s a little bit of context to when I heard this story.

So my mom said it. She’s from southern Indiana.

And a few years back, we were on a trip to Spain, and we were at the Alhambra.

And we were waiting in the courtyard, ready to go into the palace.

And there are a lot of feral cats there.

And we were watching these cats.

And one of the tourists had a little tiny chihuahua.

And one of the feral cats, who was bigger than the dog, ran up to him, stuck out his paw, smacked the chihuahua on the behind, and ran away.

And my mom said the cat was counting coo on the dog.

Yeah.

And what did she have to say about it?

She said it was like the cat wasn’t trying to hurt the dog or anything, wasn’t trying to just, I don’t know, maybe get a point and kind of one-up the dog, show him his boss.

I’m not sure.

Kind of like playing gotcha last.

My little brother needs to do that.

Gotcha last.

Actually, let me ask you a question about your mom. What does she do for a living? Because it’s a perfectly appropriate term for this in some ways. But it’s curious to me that she’s using a term which I consider to be just not everyday English.

Well, she was a French teacher. And that might, like the word coup, that might be it. But I think I did ask her about it. And she said, like, in her opinion, it was kind of a normal term. I don’t know. She thought there might be, like, some etymology going back to, like, Sedler’s talking about natives.

That’s right. That’s exactly right. Yeah. I’m not surprised to find that she’s a teacher, and I’m not surprised to find that she has some French in her background, because counting coup is a mix of an English word and a French word. The word is C-O-U-P, and it means a hit or a strike or a touch or a stroke, something like that. And it goes back to the Native Americans.

There were a lot of Plains Indians, and still are, who have something called counting coup. This was a term first described in the European languages in French way back in the 1700s. And what it involves is instead of attacking your enemy to kill them or hurt them, you strike them or you touch them with your hand or your weapon or something known as a coup stick in order to show your bravery.

So you get near the enemy and you touch them.

And then when you go back to recount your deeds in war, you and the other people who are out there fighting support each other and say, yes, I saw him do that.

Yes, he was very brave.

Yes, this battle went very well.

He was in the face of this horrible enemy.

He stood strong and he represented the tribe well and he represented our people well.

And so Ku is and was a very important idea of strength and masculinity and the warrior spirit and that sort of thing.

If you Google counting coup plus Native American, you’ll come across tons of really fantastic books that talk about this and talk about how foreign it was to the Europeans, how the Europeans really didn’t understand why wouldn’t you just kill them?

Why wouldn’t you just go after them with your weapon, your gun?

And a lot of the Native Americans then, sometimes even now, according to what I’ve read, still see guns as cowardly because you’re shooting from afar.

You’re not approaching the thing that’s dangerous.

You’re not approaching the enemy.

And so this cat going after this chihuahua, it really looks like that.

He’s going in, being tough, smacking the chihuahua on the rear, and taking off just to show that he could, just to show that he was brave, just to show that he wasn’t afraid.

I love it.

Oh, that’s cool.

Yeah, it’s cool to know that it comes from an actual practice, that it wasn’t just some made-up weird term.

Yeah, I’m no expert on this at all.

And what you’re hearing from me is kind of a layperson’s understanding of coup and counting coup and the recounting of deeds of war after the war is over, the battle is over.

But I highly encourage you and everyone listening to Google counting coups.

It’s C-O-U-P.

It seems so strange now.

We think of all battles as completely vanquishing the other enemy, completely overwhelming them and killing them or that sort of thing.

And it didn’t always have to be like that, at least as far as some of the Plains Indians were concerned.

Wow.

Okay.

Well, thank you so much for teaching me about that.

I hadn’t known.

Yeah.

I just thought it was a weird expression, and I’m glad to know that there’s some substance behind it.

Call us again sometime, all right?

All right.

Thank you.

Thanks, Amanda.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Yeah, so the first use that I find of this in print is from 1742 in French.

Yeah, I’d be curious what the Native American term is and how they talk about that.

I think it would depend on the language being spoken.

I do know that the stuff that I’ve read when I worked at an anthropology museum about this subject, they do use the English slash French term for this.

Unfortunately for a lot of Native Americans, English is their day-to-day language, and so they do use the English term for this.

So not all the languages have been well-preserved and are in continuous daily use, although some are, which is wonderful.

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