Fancy French Friday: coup de grâce
Every American writer likes to throw in some Fancy French now and then.
Who can blame them? It makes your otherwise tedious vocabularly a little more spicy, a little less midwestern, and just a touch ‘escargot.’
Today’s Fancy French Frase is coup de grâce, a term that I now realized I’ve been misusing for many years.
Coup de in French is something like blow, strike, clap, sudden change. When combined with other words into a compound phrase, it can mean anything from ‘feeling drained all of a sudden’ to ’sunburn’ to ‘a push in the right direction.’ The main focus is on the suddenness of something. For example, a military coup is a change in governance that happens suddenly.
Grâce in French mostly means what it sounds like, grace, thanks, or mercy.
Coup de grâce is a compound phrase that originated in wartime - it was the final blow that put some severely injured soldier out of his misery, a merciful blow sending him to his maker with grace.
So, a coup de grâce is a sudden, merciful ending to a period of suffering.
“The national recession was the ailing company’s final coup de grâce.”
