Of "Chickenshit"

The term "chickenshit" is by no means new but would seem to have seen its usage surge again and again to new heights over the years.

Famously associated with the period of the Second World War, it seems that, according to Google's Ngram viewer, usage of the term surged tenfold between 1939 and 1945. According to historian Paul Fussell's 1990 book Wartime the term denoted "behavior that makes military life worse than it need be," not least "petty harassment of the weak by the strong . . . sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline . . . insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances."

The person of what may be called "conventional" mind--respectful of power and disrespectful of those who have none, unquestioning of received wisdom and contemptuous of those who do question it, ever ready to suck up and punch down and thus do their part in facilitating bullies--tends to dismiss charges that such a thing exists, but that is not because this particular evil is absent, but because they are of conventional mind, while I would hasten to add this is hardly unique to military institutions. Quite the contrary, it would seem to pervade any hierarchical institution where scope exists for the exercise of petty power and authority--while I suspect that in just about every one of them such practice, contrary to what its defenders may feebly attempt to argue, gets in the way of that institution's ability to perform its essential task. If those who have authority and power and responsibility have time for "petty harassment," "sadism," "insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances" they are not attending to whatever useful functions they may have had--while those on the receiving end, subjected to the harassment, sadism and the rest, start seeing everything to which they are subjected as that, and give it exactly the consideration that such things deserve, which becomes a problem when a matter actually is not chickenshit. But of course those mentally of a kind so as to defend this behavior--those whom William Thackeray memorably termed the "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery and brutality"--will never admit to that and it may not be much good arguing with them to any such end, for after all, YOU CAN'T WIN AN ARGUMENT WITH AN IDIOT.