cowardice
American Heritage Dictionary:
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cow·ard·ice
(kou'ər-dĭs) 
n.
Ignoble fear in the face of danger or pain.
n.
Ignoble fear in the face of danger or pain.
[Middle English cowardise, from Old French couardise, alteration of couardie, from couard, coward. See coward.]
Roget's Thesaurus:
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cowardice
noun
- Ignoble lack of courage: chickenheartedness, cowardliness, cravenness, dastardliness, faint-heartedness, funk, pusillanimity, unmanliness. Slang gutlessness, yellowness, yellow streak. See fear/courage.
Oxford Companion to Military History:
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cowardice
Cowardice in a military context is the refusal to confront the hardships of combat, the possibility of injury and death, and the requirement for self-sacrifice. Cowardice is distinct from fear. In any situation, military or otherwise, fear is a natural and rational response to the prospect of extreme discomfort and pain. Veterans of combat have often written of the fear which they and their fellows felt, and have usually been wary of if not actively hostile towards those who, professing themselves fearless, might involve them in unnecessary risks. In combat the soldier who proves unwilling to control his fear and who chooses self-preservation over duty is labelled a coward, losing the respect and loyalty of colleagues and facing punishment under military law. The concept of cowardice, therefore, incorporates both the individual's action and the reaction to it; what turns an otherwise natural, human response into something to be deplored is the context of combat.
There are two explanations for the intolerance of cowardice traditionally shown by military organizations. The first concerns general, embedded expectations of appropriate male behaviour in extremis; fear may be natural, but mature, dutiful, and responsible men are expected to control it. The second is that the entire purpose of military training and organization is to make sure that when the ‘fight or flight’ autonomic response takes place, the soldier chooses the former. A military unit must be disciplined, cohesive, and efficient if it is to withstand the pressures of combat and one individual's cowardice may undermine the whole unit's effectiveness, either by emulation or simply by opening a hole in a position that the enemy may exploit.
A distinction should be drawn between the unwillingness to confront battle, and an inability to do so. The 20th century has seen the gradual development of a more sympathetic assessment of the effects of battle on the human mind, and it is now widely accepted that some who might previously have been considered cowards may in fact be psychiatric casualties and their behaviour the involuntary symptoms of battle stress.
— John P. Campbell
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
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Cowardice
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"Coward" redirects here. For other meanings including as a surname, see Coward (disambiguation).
Cowardice is the perceived failure to demonstrate sufficient mental robustness and courage in the face of a challenge. Under many military codes of justice, cowardice in the face of combat is a crime punishable by death (cf. shot at dawn). The term describes a personality trait which is viewed as a negative characteristic and has been shunned and disdained (see norms) within most, if not all cultures, while courage, typically viewed as its direct opposite, is generally rewarded and encouraged.
Cowards are usually seen to have avoided or refused to engage in a confrontation or struggle which has been deemed good or righteous by the wider culture in which they live. On a more mundane level, the label may be applied to those who are regarded as too frightened or overwhelmed to defend their rights or those of others from aggressors in their lives.
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Contents
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Military law
Acts of cowardice have long been punishable by military law, which defines a wide range of cowardly offenses including desertion in face of the enemy and surrendering to the enemy against orders. The punishment for such acts is typically severe, ranging from corporal punishment to the death sentence. Cowardly conduct is specifically mentioned within the United States Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Etymology
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Look up cowardice in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word coward came into English from the Old French word coart (modern French couard), a combination of the word for "tail" (Modern French queue, Latin cauda) and an agent noun suffix. It would therefore have meant "one with a tail" — perhaps from the habit of animals displaying their tails in flight ("turning tail"), or from a dog's habit of putting its tail between its legs when it is afraid.[citation needed]. Like many other English words of French origin, this word was introduced in the English language by the French-speaking Normans, after the Norman conquest of England in 1066.[1]
The English surname Coward (as in Noël Coward), however, has the same origin and meaning as the word "cowherd".
See also
References
External links
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Translations:
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Cowardice
Français (French)
n. - lâcheté, poltronnerie
Deutsch (German)
n. - Feigheit
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ανανδρία, δειλία
Italiano (Italian)
codardia, vigliaccheria, viltà, pusillanimità
Português (Portuguese)
n. - covardia (f)
Español (Spanish)
n. - cobardía
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - feghet, rädsla
中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
胆小, 懦弱, 卑怯
中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 膽小, 懦弱, 卑怯
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) الجبن, تخوف
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Copyrights:
American Heritage Dictionary
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Roget's Thesaurus
Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary Copyright © 1995 byHoughton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Oxford Companion to Military History
The Oxford Companion to Military History. Copyright © 2001, 2004 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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Wikipedia on Answers.com
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Cowardice.
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