Although coupon and capon are similar-sounding words, and although they both derive from sources meaning to cut, the two words are not related to one another. The ultimate source of coupon is the Greek kolaphos, meaning a blow or a punch, which Latin adopted as colaphus; this Latin word then evolved into the French coup, also meaning a blow as in coup de grace or coup d’etat. From this noun, French formed the verb couper, meaning to cut, which in turn gave rise to two French words that English adopted in the early nineteenth century: coupon, the name of a food voucher that can be cut from a magazine or newspaper, and coupe, originally the name of a carriage that was a “cut-off” version of a longer one, but now\u2014after having been anglicized to coupe\u2014the name of a two-door car. In contrast, the ultimate source of capon, the name of a rooster castrated to make its flesh more tasty, is the Greek koptein, which also happens to mean to cut. From this Greek word, the ancient Romans derived the word capo, a word they bestowed on roosters that had received, like Julius Caesar, “the most unkindest cut of all” (according to Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian, Brutus stabbed Caesar in his testicles). In the eleventh century, or perhaps even earlier, Old English adopted this Latin word as capun, which was respelt in the fourteenth century as capon. A distant relative of capon, but one that also derives from the Greek koptein, is comma, the name of a punctuation mark indicating where a clause or phrase is terminated or “cut off.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Although coupon and capon are similar-sounding words, and although they both derive from sources meaning to cut, the two words are not related to one another. The ultimate source of coupon is the Greek kolaphos, meaning a blow or a punch, which Latin adopted as colaphus; this Latin word then evolved into the French coup, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c"],"yoast_head":"\n