Un coup de fil
It's 1975, and Jeannette has just settled into a steaming bubble bath when the telephone rings. She leaps out, slips on the bath mat,
races dripping through the apartment, tangles herself in the curly phone cord, and finally gasps, "Allô ?" Only to hear her friend
cheerfully announce, "Je voulais juste te passer un petit coup de fil pour te dire que j'ai retrouvé mes clés !"
- "I just wanted to give you a quick call to tell you I found my keys!" The "quick little call" lasted fifteen
seconds, but it left a trail of wet footprints across the apartment and a very confused cat wondering what on earth had just happened.
That's the spirit of un coup de fil: not a long conversation, just a brief, spur-of-the-moment call that sometimes requires
maximum effort from the person answering.
In those days, to reach your friend across town, you didn't send a text, leave a voicemail, or fire off a dozen emojis. You sent a
little burst of electricity racing down a copper wire. If you were not planning a long conversation, you were just giving the wire a quick
tap. That quick "tap on the wire" became un coup de fil. But why a coup (a blow, strike, or
hit), you might ask?
Origin
Of course, no one was actually whacking telephone wires with a stick. Here, coup is used in one of its many figurative senses: a quick, brief action. French uses coup this way all the time:
- un coup d'œil - a quick glance
- un coup de main - a helping hand (literally, "a hand strike")
- un coup de téléphone - a telephone call
- un coup de frein - a tap on the brakes
- un coup de balai - a quick sweep with a broom
So un coup de fil was simply a quick use of the telephone wire. A brief call.
What’s especially amusing is that we’ve kept saying un coup de fil long after telephone wires vanished from our daily lives. The wires disappeared; the expression refused to go anywhere. It’s a bit like English speakers saying “hang up,” even though our phones haven’t hung from hooks in decades.
In other words, the telephone got wireless, but the languages apparently never received the memo.
Examples
N'oublie pas de me passer un coup de fil la prochaine fois que tu vas en ville; on essaiera de se voir.
Don't forget to give me a call next time you're in town; we'll try and get together.
Elle passe toujours un coup de fil à sa mère quand elle voyage, juste pour l'assurer que tout va bien.
She always call her mother when she's out of town, just to tell her she's fine.