Sunday Word: Poltroon
poltroon [pol-troon]
noun:
a wretched coward, lacking courage; ignobly timid and faint-hearted
Examples:
Turned him into a scaredy-cat. A yellow belly. A cowardly custard. Faint-of-heart, jellyfish, gutless wonder, chickenheart, pantywaist, poltroon and wheyface. You get to pick. (Rich Johnson, What Will The (Or A) Joker Do With Red Hood Now? (Spoilers), Bleeding Cool News, November 2023)
H L Mencken had made his name satirizing 'boobus Americanus' and trumpeting his belief that the average American was an 'ignoramus and poltroon.' (Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, H L Mencken's Cynical Commentary Made Americans Laugh - Little Did They Know, Historynet, November 2020)
Although often cast as a rich poltroon or amiably ineffectual, he also had a firm grasp of emotional control; sometimes there was a look of real hurt just above that prominent chin. (Gavin Gaughan, Edward Herrmann: Character actor on screen whose air of Ivy League solidity and intelligence made him an ideal leading man on stage, Independent, March 2015)
I now stood in the empty hall; before me was the breakfast-room door, and I stopped, intimidated and trembling. What a miserable little poltroon had fear, engendered of unjust punishment, made of me in those days! (Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre)
"If you are not, after all," resumed the duke, "the veriest coward and most lily-livered poltroon in all his majesty's dominions, follow me into that carriage, Prince." (William Henry Farn, Sylvester's Eve)
Origin:
'A coward; a nidgit; a scoundrel' [Johnson, who spells it poltron], 1520s, from French poultron 'rascal, coward; sluggard' (16c, Modern French poltron), from Italian poltrone 'lazy fellow, coward,' from poltro 'lazy, cowardly,' which is apparently from poltro 'couch, bed', perhaps from a Germanic source (compare Old High German polstar 'pillow, or perhaps from Latin pullus 'young of an animal' (from PIE root pau- 'few, little'). (Online Etymology Dictionary)
When you get down to synonyms, a poltroon is just a chicken. Barnyard chickens are fowl that have long been noted for timidity, and the name chicken has been applied to human cowards since the 17th century. Poltroon has been used for wimps and cravens for even longer, since the early 16th century at least. And if you remember that chickens are dubbed poultry, you may guess that the birds and the cowards are linked by etymology as well as synonymy. English picked up poltroon from Middle French, which in turn got it from Old Italian poltrone, meaning 'coward.' The Italian term has been traced to the Latin pullus, a root that is also an ancestor of pullet ('a young hen') and poultry. (Merriam-Webster)
In the eighteenth century its origin was widely believed to be that suggested by an eminent French classical scholar of the previous century, Claudius Salmasius. He theorised that the word derived from medieval longbowmen. One who wished not to risk his skin in combat had only to make himself incapable of drawing a longbow by cutting off his right thumb. In Latin, pollice truncus meant maimed in the thumb; Salmasius asserted that this had become corrupted into the French poltron.
In the nineteenth century this wildly inventive view was no longer believed. Scholars noted instead that in French - and also in the obviously related Italian poltrone - the word didn't just mean a coward but also someone who wallowed in sloth and idleness. This led them to believe that it originated in Italian poltro, a couch, an etymology respectable enough to be cited in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Today's Oxford etymologists are sure both stories are wrong. They point instead to the classical Latin pullus for the young of any animal, particularly a young domestic fowl or chicken. It's the source also of pullet and is related to poultry and - more distantly - to foal. The link is an ancient reference to the notoriously timorous and craven behaviour of farmyard fowl. So a poltroon is chicken. How appropriate. (World Wide Words)