 Solution

Using the dual pairing, monotonicity meansStrict monotonicity requires strict positivity whenever $u\ne v$. Coercivity with respect to zero, in the growth sense used for monotone-operator existence theory, meansThis is a condition on all sequences escaping to infinity, not just each fixed direction with a bound depending on that direction. Strict monotonicity concerns pairs of distinct arguments; it does not by itself imply this uniform large-norm growth.