French kids can't cope with "coping."

"More than 10,000 French pupils have signed a petition calling for the education minister to cancel an 'impossible' question in this year's baccalaureate English exam."

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?”...

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.”

ADDED: Here's a little help from the OED:

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

"And this was a man in constant pain. Denied drinking or eating, he sucked on tiny ice chips."

"Where others might have beguiled themselves with thoughts of divine purpose (why me?) and dreams of an afterlife, Christopher had all of literature."

Over the three days of my final visit I took note of his subjects. Not long after he stole my Ackroyd, he was talking to me of a Slovakian novelist; whether Dreiser in his novels about finance was a guide to the current crisis; Chesterton’s Catholicism; Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” which I had brought for him on a previous visit; Mann’s “Magic Mountain” — he’d reread it for reflections on German imperial ambitions toward Turkey; and because we had started to talk about old times in Manhattan, he wanted to quote and celebrate James Fenton’s “German Requiem”: “How comforting it is, once or twice a year,/To get together and forget the old times.”

Ian McEwan, attending the dying Christopher Hitchens.