coward

   In Act One of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, when Face and Subtle are having a slanging-match, Subtle calls his housekeeper ‘Cow-herd!’ Perhaps Jonson himself, and his audience, assumed that this was the original form of ‘coward’, though etymologists tell us that the word has more to do with the hare, especially the tail of the hare, than the cow.

   An early form of the word was ‘coart’, the ‘co’ representing Old French coe, ‘tail’. The hare, after all, is a very timid animal. One is more likely to see its tail as it disappears than any other part of its anatomy. ‘Coward!’ is a typical playground taunt - see also Custard, cowardy cowardy. In An American Dream, by Norman Mailer, the hero admonishes himself with ‘you coward’. Mrs Raddle, in The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens, calls her husband ‘you coward’ ‘with supreme contempt’. He has just declined her invitation to knock a number of men down the stairs, which he would do, she tells him, ‘if you was a man’. ‘Come down from there, you yellow coward’ is spoken by a woman to a young man in Truman Capote’s short story My Side of the Matter.