Cowardice

At the warrior stage of culture, physical courage was the most esteemed virtue, and correspondingly the greatest social ignominy was the stigma of cowardice. Today, however, the social value of courage is modified by notions of political or diplomatic skills in avoiding confrontation. As the entry for the Anglo-Saxon period shows, the value of absolute loyalty to the clan and to the chief was celebrated, both in battle poems and those poignantly depicting the life of disgraced exiles. The primary term in the ancient language for “cowardly” was earg , which had the subsidiary meanings of “evil, wretched, vile.”

The modern term coward entered the language around 1250. Interestingly derived from Old French coart , ultimately Latin cauda , “a tail,” the base meaning alludes, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , to the habit of an animal “turning tail” in fright. It was previously a highly emotive and provocative term that could be grounds for a duel. Cowardice and treach- ery are obviously related to a degree, as is shown in the entry for renegade, meaning one who deserts a cause. Runagate , a “vagabond, fugitive or renegade” is an anglicized form showing the same link, notably in an early use from Richard III (1591), where Richard dismisses Richmond as a “white-livered runagate” (IV iv 465).

The allusion to the white liver derives from a whole series of terms in medieval physiognomy explaining courage and cowardice as having physical origins. Specifically it was believed that the liver was the seat of the passions, and that a liver lacking color indicated weakness or lack of courage. (The term courage , incidentally, is rooted in Latin cor, meaning “heart.”) This folklore led to the scornful epithet lily-livered , found in Macbeth (V iii 17). Despite its fanciful origins, the term is still current.

Other terms showing the same association are stomach and guts , both perpetuating the folklorish notion of the stomach as the seat of courage and strong emotions. The first still survives principally in the idiom to have “the stomach for a fight,” memorably used by Queen Elizabeth when she addressed her troops on the eve of the Spanish Armada in 1588: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” Guts was previously not a low-register word, being used by Sir Philip Sidney in his translation of the Psalms in 1580. Jonathan Swift was one of the first to incorporate the sense of “courage” in his Polite Conversation (1738): “The fellow’s well enough, if he had any guts in his brain.” Now well established, guts has the related forms gutsy, gutsiness , and the condemning gutless , first used by Ezra Pound in a letter of 1900.

American English has absorbed many of these terms and idioms, and added its own. A compound linking the old world with the new is chicken-hearted , meaning “fearful” and “cowardly” in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785). Other compounds, notably chicken-livered , preceded the development of the free-standing chicken about 1933. This has extended to the idioms derived from teenage car duels, of playing chicken and chickening out , and the contemptuous chickenshit , euphemized to C.S. The other principal term is yellow , recorded in P.T. Barnum’s Struggles and Triumphs: “We never thought your heart was yellow” (1856, 400). It was extended to yellow-belly , possibly associated with a Mexican, from the color of a Mexican soldier’s uniform. This introduces the stereotypical association of cowardice with certain nationalities on the basis of recent war experience. Although the terminology of cowardice has generally become more physical and less moral in its focus, it still retains a stinging and insulting edge in personal use.