The exam... presented a passage from Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” relating to the book’s central character, Robbie Turner. The notorious “Question M” asked, “What are three of his concerns about the situation?” and “How is Turner coping with the situation?”...ADDED: Here's a little help from the OED:
Pupil Arthur, 17, (whose family name was not given) told reporters on Monday that after the exam he spoke to a friend at a different school who also had trouble with “coping.”
“So I launched a petition to see if others were as baffled as us, and it went viral,” he said. “Loads of people were stumped with 'coping'. It’s obviously not a word in common usage.”
a1825 R. Forby Vocab. E. Anglia (1830) Cope. The use of this word is confined to warreners, who are said to ‘cope’ their ferrets, when they sew or tie up their mouths, to prevent them from biting rabbits, when they..drive them from their holes.ALSO: Let me be seriously helpful, using the (unlinkable) OED. The original meaning has to do with coming to blows, and it actually comes from French, the word couper, meaning "to strike (now to cut)." The figurative meaning is "To contend with, face, encounter (dangers, difficulties, etc.)," often in the context of a successful fight.
I remember much discussion, back in the 1950s and 60s, about the use of "cope" without "with [something]," and the OED acknowledges this as a colloquialism. It offers a quote that shows the problem language commentators had with it:
1958 I. J. C. Brown Words in our Time 41 ‘She suffers from copelessness.’ I have heard this said of an unsatisfactory employee. The use of cope as a verb by itself to describe dealing with all kinds of situations is a recent usage. In my youth we tried, or were told to try, to cope with this or that problem. We were not required to cope in general.I'd never noticed the word "copelessness" before. I searched the NYT archive for it and found exactly one usage — by Andy Rooney (of all people). It was 1987, and what he wanted was a presidential candidate who didn't want to be President. So, he's imagining this character — "someone above the fray who is barely willing to serve if chosen" — talking to a reporter who asks him if he has anything embarrassing in his personal life. His answer includes: "I saw a psychiatrist in 1969 when I was suffering from copelessness, and recently I read about Jessica Hahn in Playboy while I was getting a haircut."
Now, do I have to explain who Jessica Hahn was? Or is that too far down the rabbit hole? My lips are coped!
Sam Kinison Wild Thing by Celtiemama
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48 comments:
In a triggered world, coping is out.
Next step: a general strike.
I see their point.
But if Robbie Turner were a finish carpenter, then I'd be less sympathetic.
Ummmmm, so most kids don't get any credit for their inability to cope with cope? Has the point of exams become making sure everyone gets 100%?
If you can't cut it, get a coping saw.
How about 12 years of summer camp followed by a diploma?
What is the French term ? Maybe that is the issue that doesn't make sense in English.
It does seem to be translation issue.
"Adaptation" seem to be the equivalent in French.
The French have famously not learned to cope with the Amerikan tourist's bad French and worse English. They're just learning that when an Amerikan says "absolutely!" he simply means "yes" and when he says, "The problem is, is that ..." he really meant to say, "The problem is that...."
I'm with Michael K. How can this story translate, unless we know how often their word for "coping" is used in France? We have synonyms for common words that can be quite obscure.
The French don't understand how to cope? Explains a lot.
Precious snowflakes are incapable of coping. Yeah, The West is dead.
Ditto Michael K.
Ditto n. dit·to The same as stated above or before.
Althouse is such an amazing journalist. Where does she get this stuff? It's so off the wall and cool.
"Where does she get this stuff?"
Probably the Daily Mail which had the same story. I read it to find out about US politics.
I guess Coping a feel has nothing to do with oral sex. So it has to be a trick question.
To the barricades, formez vos bataillons!
This article reminds me of how many words the Eskimos have for snow. It makes sense that a culture would have a lot of words for snow, when snow plays such a huge part of your culture.
In the USA we have a word for "coping." Why do we need this word? Why do we have this word? It's interesting that the French don't have this concept in their language, apparently. Maybe they're too busy with their lives to come up with this whiny word to express how difficult their lives are.
When you look up the word, it derives from the French(!) word "coup," which means to strike a blow. So we have this masculine fighting French word, that has somehow become a wussy English word that the French no longer recognize.
We don't know how to cope so we will have a coup!
An interesting part of French political tradition is the street mobs demanding whatever from the Government/King.
It seems the streets of Paris were once all so narrow that they could easily be barricaded to keep the king's Army out and hold Paris hostage.
So the first thing the renewal Bourbons, after Napoleon's amazing era, did was put in the super wide boulevards of Paris so Paris could not be barricaded by rebels again.
I'm a fan of Ian McEwan, although I haven't read that one.
It's a good movie!
I like how the student, confronted with material he does not understand, concludes that the material must not be relevant to his course of study.
"Coping" is, of course, a word in common usage. Any student of English would do well to make a note of the gap in their knowledge and take steps to close it.
"So the first thing the renewal Bourbons, after Napoleon's amazing era, did was put in the super wide boulevards of Paris so Paris could not be barricaded by rebels again."
For which the Germans were grateful.
Political correctness. Microaggressions. Speech codes. Trigger warnings. Safe zones.
It's time for people to grow the hell up.
cope = "se débrouiller, "to get by, to manage". Very common.
Ann, tell them where you get this stuff.
I've recently had a tough time coping with a dull coping saw as I was decorating the coping around the pool.
Anyone remember the line from the 80's pop song about the TV series, "General Hospital"?
"I just can't cope, without my soap!
The French idea of coping is to make do with cake when what you really want is bread.
Richard Lawrence Cohen said "Ann, tell them where you get this stuff."
Everyone! I got this stuff from Richard Lawrence Cohen, my ex-husband, who (I think) regularly follows the news from France... in French!
"I just can't cope, without my soap!"
I don't know about that, but I do know that back in the 1960s, the use of the verb "cope" like that -- without the added "with [something] -- was the subject of much discussion -- almost as much as "Us Tarryton smokers would rather fight than switch" and "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should."
People had taken to saying "I can't cope," and some people thought that was quite wrong.
A similar thing happened with "fraught" some years later. People started saying that a situation was "fraught." Not "fraught with" something (like danger), just "fraught," and many people objected. I objected. I still object.
The real irony is that "cope" comes "from Old French coper, colper, from cop, colp 'a blow', via Latin from Greek kolaphos 'blow with the fist'." (Oxford English Dictionary.)
"se débrouiller" is literally "to clear away the mist" and in french we even have a descriptive noun "débrouillard" for which there is no english equivalent. "Coper" comes close.
For heaven's sake, they're French. That's all we need to know.
I've recently had a tough time coping with a dull coping saw as I was decorating the coping around the pool.
Oh, the old coping saw.
Where is the Academie in all this?
That Sam Kinison "cover" is all sorts of awful. I have coping strategies planned for whenever it strikes.
Copelessness is a bon mot play on hopelessness
How did the warreners get the ferrets to hold still when they sewed their lips together. If I were a ferret, I would have a lot of trouble coping with my lips sewn together.
If you have a special place to go when you can't cope, is that your copepod?
Sam Kinison was great but Hair Metal sucked. That's probably why it only lasted for a few years.
Jimbino 1144: so what you're saying is, you don't speak French. If you do, please now explain why what you posted there is absurd.
The video is all I wanted to say about Jessica Hahn.
I remember the first time I heard the phrase, "I just couldn't cope." It was in the 60s and said to me a young woman who had tried to commit suicide and was rescued by her then current love interest.
a1825 R. Forby Vocab. E. Anglia (1830) Cope. The use of this word is confined to warreners, who are said to ‘cope’ their ferrets, when they sew or tie up their mouths, to prevent them from biting rabbits, when they..drive them from their holes.
This could not have been well-researched. Cope has been an English verb since at least the Elizabethan Age. It's falconry vernacular, and it means to trim the beak. A bird's beak grows, and in the case of captive birds the diet doesn't wear the beak down sufficiently. In the case of a bird of prey the maxillary hook is the main concern; if allowed to grow the hook will eventually grow so long that the bird can't eat. Consequently falconers from distant antiquity learned to trim or grind their birds' beaks. In English this is called coping. When I was an active falconer I used an emory board, three or four light strokes on each side once a week was all my birds needed -- quick, painless, hygienic, and nobody got stressed out. People who keep pet parrots (or any kind of bird) also must deal with beak growth. They adopted the practice and the word from falconry decades ago.
The more common sense of to cope means to manage an ongoing problem or concern, and I think its likely that the word was adopted from falconry since coping is literally the management of the problem of the uncontrolled beak growth.
In case you doubt me here's a video of coping a falcon
(reposted with typos corrected)
Wow! Even Wiktionary documents the falconry term. I'm really surprised the OED didn't, unless Althouse just overlooked it, because that definition is very ancient, and is a clue to the modern usage.
R. Forby might have discovered his East Anglian warners borrowed the term from falconry he'd looked more closely.
Check it again.
Frankly, I haven't been this disappointed in quite some time.
I was looking for a "Real Men Don't Quit; They Cope" Copenhagen advertisement and all I came up with is this:
https://tobaccopreventionk12.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/cope.png?w=291&h=310
Now Laslo won't ever wanna take me dancing....
.... At the Copacabanna with Franny Ford Coppala copulating, kinda, with Kopechne Carlyle.
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