Coup de Grâce

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good morning. This is Vera Miller in San Diego.

Hi, Vera. Welcome to the program.

What can we do for you, Vera?

Well, my family and I at Thanksgiving were discussing, I don’t know why this came up, but the phrase coup de grace, we were finding that we were unclear on the proper use of it now.

We know it originated, I don’t know where from, but a mercy killing.

And then we were discussing how to properly pronounce it.

Is it coup de grace or coup de grace?

So we’d love to hear your side of this.

All right.

Well, there’s one side to it, right?

Right, there’s one side.

And the correct pronunciation is coup de grace.

Yes.

Right.

And it’s literally stroke of mercy in French, and it originally referred to mercy killing, the doing in of a mortally wounded person or creature.

I said for many years growing up coup de grace because I think we get a little, if we don’t know French, then we get a little nervous around it.

And I always said coup de gras.

And then I realized that gras, G-R-A-S in French, it’s fat.

It means fat.

So I was saying stroke them.

Well, maybe that did have something to do with your Thanksgiving dinner, right?

When you stroke your rolls of fat, they jiggle.

Right, right.

Gras in French is fat like Mardi Gras is Fat Tuesday, right?

And there’s some influence there probably, right?

Fois de gras.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, foie de gras, exactly.

Yes, it originally meant mercy killing.

And then it came to develop a sense of sort of the final finishing touch of something, you know, a decisive event.

Negative or positive, right?

Right, right.

Because originally it was the thing where it was the final stroke of death.

You were killing or finishing off something, right?

Right, right.

And now it can be either positive or negative.

You could say that this latest film is the coup de grace on an already successful career.

That’s interesting, Grant, because that is what I had kind of heard it used that way, and yet when we talked about it and then looking it up, like you say, it was meant to be a negative, I guess.

But it sort of has sort of evolved it both ways.

There was a funny term I’d never heard of either in looking this up, and it said, coup de grace is called a hyper-foreignism, and I’d never heard of that term.

All that.

Yeah, that would make sense.

Yeah, where we say it, we over-exaggerate the foreignness of a word in order to make it sound more foreign.

Okay.

And we end up sounding silly.

Yeah, we end up sounding silly to people in the know.

So the pronunciation is coup de grace.

And I guess, is it proper to use it then for both ways for a final success, ultimate success?

Well, that’s up to you.

Probably if you’re writing in a formal way for something business-related or high-level form of speech, you probably want to stick to just the oldest meaning.

I find that most dictionaries have not caught up with the newer version, which can be positive or negative, and they’re decades behind in that.

They simply just have not updated their entries.

But you will find tons of the best writers who use coup de grace to mean a finishing touch in a positive way.

Interesting.

Very good, very good.

Wow, this is interesting, and thank you very, very much.

Vera, thank you for calling.

Thanks.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye, then.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

I guess we should say that coup de grace isn’t fully adopted into English, which is why the pronunciation still follows the French rules and the pluralization still follows the French rules.

Good point.

Right?

Because some words we’ve borrowed so far into English that they’ve just lost their, you know, they follow English rules for plurals or English rules for pronunciation.

Right.

And this isn’t one of those yet.

Right.

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