Literature set in England in the 1700s and 1800s is a good place to find exclamations like “You hare-hearted, milk-livered poltroon!” (1769). It was both a generalized insult and a specific reference to being cowardly. It’s such an apt thing to shout at someone that you still find it in modern works like Mutiny on the Bounty from 1951 (“Queeg is a poltroon”) and Angela’s Ashes from 1996 (“Mr. O’Dea is yelling, ‘Come out, O’Neill, you chancer, you poltroon.’”)
There used to be some disagreement about where “poltroon” came from. In the 1700s, Claudius Salmasius was a well-known historian who claimed the word came from the Latin phrase “pollice truncus.” It meant a thumb injury, and Salmasius thought it referred to Medieval archers who wanted to avoid battle, so they “accidentally” suffered a bad cut on the thumb that made it impossible to use a bow. “Pollice truncus,” the theory went, had been shortened to “poltron,” which was supposedly the French version of “poltroon.”
That idea lasted about a century. Not bad, as ideas go, but by the 1800s it occurred to somebody that a poltroon, in addition to being a coward, was probably lazy as well, and would prefer to just stay home and loll around on the couch. It just so happens that the Italian word for couch is “poltro,” and “poltron” (the Italian “poltron,” not the French one) meant a lazy person. So according to this story, “poltron” came from “poltro,” because that’s where you’d be likely to find a “poltroon.”
That managed to convince the original editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, so that’s the derivation you’ll see in the first edition. More recently, though, the thinking is that “poltroon,” while still derived from Latin, is based on the same word that evolved into “poultry:” “pullus.” To put it another way, when you read about someone being called a “poltroon,” just assume they’re being called chicken.
