Coup de grâce

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:37 PM -0400 5/23/04, Sean Fitzpatrick wrote:
><<a feeling that final consonants should not be pronounced in any
>word which they are conscious is French. >>
>
>What?! What?!  They aren't??
>
>When Grace Kelly married the Prince of Monaco, Life (or perhaps
>Time) magazine had a story about the trials of the transition from
>Philadelphia-Hollywood princess to Monegasque princess.  One of them
>was that her name, "Grace", as pronounced in French, sounded like
>the French word for fat (Life did not say what the French word for
>fat is, no doubt assuming that its readers would know.)
>
Well, the claim is correct modulo a couple of minor points.
(1) the word for 'fat' must be the adjective and not the noun,
(2) it must be in the feminine (_grasse_, as opposed to _gras_), and
(3) while _grasse_ is indeed pronounced in a way that sounds like
_grâce_ 'grace', the two are not (for speakers who preserve the
prescriptive distinction) pronounced identically, since the former's
vowel [a] contrasts with the latter's, the further back (and lower?)
script-a.

Unfortunately, the princess had more serious issues to cope with.

Larry