Visit theallusionist.org/coward to listen to this episode and obtain more information about the topics therein.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, find a pot of language at the end of the rainbow.
Today we’re talking about anxiety - there’s some terrific etymology, and so much more. Content note for discussion about mental health, unsurprisingly, and colonial and military harmful practices.
On with the show.
TIM CLARE: I'm like a kind of etymology conspiracy theorist, I think? Like I realize this kind of like etymological essentialism is a really odd way of going, “Well, this is the origin of the word comes from this and this." And it doesn't really matter, does it? We all know how we use the word, what we mean, right? But I quite like that idea that there are sort of secret fossil records in words, that you can kind of break apart - this idea that there might be sort of secret echoes of previous meanings contained within a word. But it’s quite grounding, as well, when you see all these ways that genetic heritage of a word, because it goes back in all sorts of directions, it just gives you a sense of place and time. And I suppose for someone who is given to being a bit of a worrywart, it's quite nice. It kind of puts a lot of things in perspective.
TIM CLARE: My name's Tim Clare, and I'm a writer and podcaster and author of the book Coward.
HZ: In his book Coward, Tim goes deep into the history and science and numerous different treatments for anxiety, a condition which he has contended with for much of his life.
HZ: What made you choose the word 'coward' for the book?
TIM CLARE: I think there's a way of turning and facing how I felt about myself, how a lot of anxious people feel about themselves, and how much of that comes from societal ideas about what we should and shouldn't do. It was actually a contentious choice. My publishers initially thought it was too negative. But that was deliberate. I love the word. I love the word 'coward'. I love the background and of its meaning.
HZ: That background is nothing to do with cows - well except in the last name Coward, which has nothing to do with cowardice, but means 'cow-herd'. 'Coward' the common noun derives from the Latin ‘cauda’, which also lent itself to words like ‘coda’ and ‘cue’ and ‘queue’ spelt the other way, and French ‘queue’: it means tail.
TIM CLARE: You find it in like heraldry, you have a lion coward, which is in heraldry a lion portrayed with its tail between its legs, in the same way you have like a lion rampant where it's jumping.
HZ: There’s this association between cowardice and an animal having its tail between its legs when it is frightened. Although in heraldry, the lions depicted coward likely just had their tails between their legs as artistic license rather than to mean "The bearer of this coat of arms is a wimp!"
TIM CLARE: But I think also I'd wanted something that was pejorative, and maybe the most flamboyantly pejorative term we have for someone who is scared.
HZ: If only the old term for coward, 'quakebuttock', hadn’t fallen out of use.
TIM CLARE: It's also one of the most politicized words we've got for fear, because I think especially most people, when they hear it, they'll think of the First World War, like the Great War, and people being shot for cowardice. They were shot for being cowards.
HZ: Cowardice, like desertion, was a military offence that carried the highest penalty. 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers were executed for cowardice in the First World War. Some hadn’t even reached the age of sixteen. Many were debilitated by fatigue and cold. Many would now be recognised as having been very traumatised by war and injuries and all the death - one man said, “I haven't been the same since I scraped my best friend's brains from my face” before he was shot at dawn by firing squad, who reported later of their horror at having to kill their own under these circumstances. But the executions were of course an example to warn the other soldiers of what happens if they too were to falter.
The executed soldiers didn’t receive fair trials, they weren’t commemorated with other soldiers who died in the war, their families were ostracized and denied the military pensions; Britain was one of the last countries holding out from pardon these people, although eventually in 2006 they did. The threat of cowardice was a critical tool for a situation that demanded obedience even to a fatal degree.
TIM CLARE: Calling someone a coward historically has often been a social lever used by the state to shame them for not doing something the state wants them to do - often walk into machine gunfire. Which, to me, doesn't seem like an act of cowardice to not want to do that.
HZ: No, a lot of the time, it seems like a reasonable preference for self-preservation and safety.
TIM CLARE: Yes, yes. This is one of the things that actually frustrated me: I spent a lot of time reading accounts from the Great War, reading some of the medical literature and research into people with shell shock, what we'd now come to know as PTSD. And one of the things that really upset me actually was this idea that, in some of the accounts where we've like rehabilitated people who were shot for cowardice on the British or the Allied side, they'll go, “See, this person wasn't a coward. They had post traumatic stress disorder." Which I suppose is an incremental advancement, but the idea is still, of course, if they'd wanted voluntarily as a human being to choose not to walk into the suicidal charges of the Somme or the Battle of the Bulge or Verdun - the idea that the only way to have not walked into your death without shame would be to have like this medical label, it just upsets me a lot. I just don't think that's true. I don't feel that it justifies shooting anyone, I'm sorry, but just because you want to win an imperial war.
HZ: Hey, look at the first French president and celeb from my history A-level, Napoleon III, appearing on two episodes in a row of the podcast! In 1871, French forces lost the Battle of Sedan to the Prussians and Napoleon III had to surrender; two years later, on his deathbed, his last words are reported to be, “Isn’t it true we weren't cowards at Sedan?” That fear of being thought cowardly went all the way up the ranks.
‘Coward’ was also one of two categories for Indian people that the British came up with after the 1857 Indian uprising against British rule.
TIM CLARE: As well as by obvious racism, British doctrine was very influenced by the work of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, this classic text that has been read and read again, and is so deeply ingrained within the doctrines of certain elements of British politics now that you'll see it pop up almost unacknowledged. Our latest incarnation of it has been the "Good times make weak men, weak men make hard times, hard times make strong men, strong men make good times": that could almost be a sort of Cliff's Notes version of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
And in India, after 1857, this doctrine was just so part of the thinking of the British colonial powers, and one thing that they started to do was they wanted to kind of recruit in such a way that they could put down any future rebellion. And they had this idea that there were really two types of Indian. And of course this is nonsense, but they divided them racially into two classes. One was kind of like weak metropolitan class of educated cowards. So anyone who had any sort of sense of culture, of education, is literate: they were intelligent, very good for helping you with out with bureaucracy, but they were weak and cowardly. And then there were people who tended to be from more rural areas, agrarian areas, mountainous regions that were seen as unsophisticated, brutish, illiterate, but brave. These were the so-called martial races that would be good for you to recruit as your footsoldiers.
A lot of Indian soldiers were executed for cowardice under the British Raj, but really, again, all it is is: the colonial leaders say, “Go and do this thing that is almost certainly going to get you killed," and they go, "No." Or they rebel. They're treated really, really badly. They're paid almost nothing. And then they're asked to go and kill their countrymen. And when they refuse, it's never framed as like what a legitimate ideological position - because what a can of worms it would be to open up.
HZ: It's cowardice versus toxic masculinity. That's the big duel that seems to be happening.
TIM CLARE: It is. And it's threatening because if people aren't scared of being called a coward, they are harder to control.
HZ: Fear is a very effective tool.
TIM CLARE: Super effective. Like I say, it's a wonderful ideological lever for reframing self-interested pacifism, or resistance against colonial powers or resistance against the government who want you to go to kill other people. You'll see it now in political discourse: people will be called cowards for not supporting this proposition or that proposition, the implication being, “Were it not for your moral querulousness, you would do what I'm telling you to, so I'm going to use the only thing I have left," which is shame, which is ostracisation. Again, going back to the First World War, we saw that with the groups of women who would go around and give men who weren't in uniform, who didn't appear to be signed up to the army, white feathers to mark them as cowards.
HZ: So all seagulls are cowards.
TIM CLARE: I think seagulls are the greatest example of lack of cowardice.
HZ: Yes, brazen!
TIM CLARE: I’d say seagulls probably are a little bit too liberated for my liking. I was speaking to some lovely schoolchildren from Cornwall and every single one of them had eagull stories about having large foodstuffs taken from them, just as they were about to bite into them, by dive bombing seagull. Sole whole bags of chips, entire kebabs: it was incredible, the amount they seemed to be able to lift.
HZ: If you have anxiety around seagulls, it might be justified. Seagulls fear nothing and stop at nothing in pursuit of what they want, which on one fateful day in 2018 was my husband Martin’s ice cream cone; he’d just bought it from an ice cream van and immediately a seagull swooped in, sliced the ice cream cone out of Martin's hands where it landed amid a cluster of more seagulls, who scoffed it in seconds, not a trace left. A real slick operation. Best day of my life, I still laugh heartily when I think about it, sorry Martin.
TIM CLARE: So I'd say seagulls are really flying the flag for bravery and white feathers being intertwined.
HZ: ‘Anxiety’ and ‘anxious’ share a root word with ‘angst’, and ‘anguish’ and ‘anger’ - and, perhaps more surprisingly, ‘quinsy’ and ‘hangnail’. The h in ‘hangnail’ is one of those linguistic fakes, added in error, it’s really ‘angnail’. And in all of these words, the ang goes allll the way back to the Proto-Indo-European root word ‘angh-’ which meant painful or tightly constricted.
TIM CLARE: And that idea of anxiety is being a ultimately that angst going back to roots of this idea of something being cut off, like a bag's drawstring being cut tight, this idea of a throat closing this idea of something being cut or constricted or tightening.
HZ: So if you’re anxious and your throat or chest feel like they’re being squeezed, these etymologies show that you’re not alone in this. Quinsy is a more literal throat-obstacle - oh, you want to know where the ‘ang’ in quinsy is? It’s from Old French ‘quinancie’, which came from the ancient Greek for sore throat, κυνάγχη, the ‘κυν’ from the word κύων which meant ‘dog’ and the ‘άγχη’ from that ‘angh’ root again. κυνάγχη translates to ‘dog-strangling’. Etymology, why have you got to go and make quinsy even worse?
HZ: I think I only came to an understanding of the condition of anxiety rather late. And I think it was when I started noticing people saying "I have anxiety" rather than "I am anxious." What's the difference between having and being?
TIM CLARE: I love these grammatical distinctions because they're huge, aren’t they? I feel you are talking about the difference between an identity and a state. And we talk about this in psychology, state/trait; this idea of anxiety as something that we have rather than something that we are. And often that is seen as being a healthier way of looking at it: I dunno about you, but this idea that “I have anxiety” implies impermanence, and we say that that's better; "I am anxious" is seen as being maybe a little bit more negative because it conflates that and your identity.
HZ: Oh, I think “I am anxious” suggests like It's a temporary state rather than a more defining characteristic, whereas "I have anxiety" suggests a condition, a recognized condition. If you say “I am anxious,” it could just be because I've got a job interview in 10 minutes, say.
TIM CLARE: Now you say it like that, I think you're right, that if someone says, “I am anxious,” I don't understand them to mean, "I've been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder." If they say, "I am anxious," I'd almost be looking around for the thing that was causing them anxiety. Or I would ask them; I’d go, “What are you feeling anxious about now?” There would be a root, wouldn't there. If someone said, “I have anxiety,” I would accept that that was what we would call a trait, trait anxiety, that's what they'd be communicating to me. Anxiety is the parrot sidekick that rides on my shoulder and occasionally squawks warnings in my ear.
I often use this term ‘anxiety’ as a little compacted version of "I have a pathological levels of anxiety that have a longer duration and a greater intensity than is adaptive or appropriate." But that would be very tedious to say over and over again, so I say, "I have anxiety." And I do wonder if there's something that's lost in that contraction. Because of course we're rich tumults of different emotions at all times, and I'm not always scared all the time, clearly not! That would be a bizarre and unsustainable and physiologically unsustainable state, of course not. So what could it possibly mean? I like the distinction between the two states.
There's a classic canard about the Bible that it contains the phrase "be not afraid" 365 times, which just is too perfect a number for me to quite trust that. But there there's no doubting that in the Bible, 'fear' appears again and again, and “do not fear”, “be not afraid”: phrases like that are used over and over again. I remember going to see a nativity with my daughter and, uh, that is the phrase I was so anxious when I went, it's a busy church, some people had seats that they knew where to sit. I feel like if I go to church, I'm going to burst into flame; my sinful self will be revealed and I'll just start burning. So I was very, very anxious and I'm just anxious in enclosed busy places anyway. And then the vicar stepped out and started talking about this line that the angels say when they appear to the shepherds, “Be not afraid" - which if you've seen depictions of biblical angels with their multiple eyes and interlocking concentric wheels, I'm not surprised that they had to add that little editorial note. But this text that has been taken on by so many people, that its most common phrase is "don't worry": I find that quite fascinating.
HZ: Wouldn't you think, if you have to say "be not afraid" that many times, wouldn't you contemplate: "Is it me? Is it something I'm doing? Maybe I should stop setting fire to trees spontaneously. Maybe I should stop appearing to people in a vision."
TIM CLARE: "Maybe I should not murder the entire planet except for one family. Maybe that is why there's sort of like an edginess when we've talked ever since; do you think that could be part of it?” There's a lack of self-awareness there. But it's the way that a lot of anxious people are talked to: "Have you considered being less anxious? Have you considered pulling your socks up?" Actually, would that you could just simply state to someone be not afraid and they'll go, “Thank you! This is entirely voluntary. My entire autonomic nervous system is actually controlled by a little dial in my belly button, I'll just turn that down." Of course, the whole idea of it being autonomic is that we don't have control.
HZ: There are several words that earlier meant “fear of the almighty” that evolved into admiring adjectives, like 'terrific' and ‘awesome’ and ‘tremendous’. So maybe anxiety will become a compliment in years to come.
TIM CLARE: I would love that. Well, we seek out anxiety all the time. If I didn't have anxiety, I couldn't enjoy a single film, because there's a tension there.
HZ: Well, that's why I can't watch farce. I can't deal with that kind of tension at all.
TIM CLARE: I can't watch any movie set in America where a character, during an argument, walks out of a house, and then there is a long, wide angle shot of them turning around and talking to someone while standing a bit in the road. I continually think a car's going to hit them.
HZ: It's like when they drive and they just full face the other person they're talking to, rather than look at the road.
TIM CLARE: It makes me so anxious.
HZ: In the course of writing Coward, and in dealing with his anxiety for so many years, Tim Clare read a thousand academic papers about anxiety, and talked to many people who work in different fields related to it and practice various treatments. And a lot of them told Tim that “There's no magic bullet,” to the point where that term became a cliche.
TIM CLARE: I got really frustrated when people would say "There's no magic bullet," partly because people would often say, "There's no magic silver bullet," and I'd be annoyed because those are two different derivations - and I'm a horrible pedant and I was like, “Silver bullets are used to kill werewolves. Magic bullets is a medical term. Let's try and differentiate between those two things.” So a silver bullet is like the perfect cure for something that is otherwise impervious to damage - anyone who's played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons will know the horrible situation where your party faces a werewolf and you can't destroy it at all because you don't have any silver weapons because why would you be carrying around silver weapons? Oh, no! Whereas a magic bullet is something that selectively kills off the thing you want to kill off without killing off anything else.
Magic bullet comes from the German 'zauberkugel', I believe, this idea of creating some kind of cure or chemical that can just take out the p athological cells, just kill off the invader in the body and not kill off the cells and the bits in the body that you do want to keep. The original zauberkugel was I think transmitted by a dye that allowed it to selectively attack the cells that one wanted to be destroyed. And I'm not criticizing on knocking neuroscience at all, but I went into this going, people are just gonna be able to look inside my brain and see fear, and they're gonna be able to pull it and extract it in the way Magneto in the beginning of the second X-Men movie pulls all the iron out of somebody's blood and turns it into a bullet, they're just gonna be able to draw the fear out of me - and that was wrong.
But I don't think I was bananas to think that that might be possible, based on the way we talk about things like anxiety and fear and the way that these words and these diagnostic labels trick us into thinking that it's something discreet and something apart from us that can be sort of lifted out of us like a teddy bear in one of those fairground grabber games, that you could just take the fear, take the cowardice, and extract it from the whole, and then it would be gone.
But to take it back to zauberkugel, the silver bullet: it's this fantasy that I had that one could fire a shot into the crowded room of our emotions and just extract the anxiety like a tooth. And then I would retire to Elysium and be this chilled out zennish pastoral poet, I guess.
HZ: Yeah. Who would you be?
TIM CLARE: I mean, it's not exactly an embarrassment of riches, looking at happy poets, is it? They didn't really have a great time.
HZ: In your decades of being someone with anxiety, have you noticed any changes in the ways that people talk about it?
TIM CLARE: When I was growing up and when I was a young man, anxiety was often framed less as a pathological life-ruining condition and more as a kind of comic misfortune, it was something that was funny, but ultimately harmless, a minor moral failing, a kind of peccadillo, a character flaw, but ultimately the anxious person was the comic character in the movie who has to breathe into a paper bag on a airplane, right? That was a panic attack. Or they were the cartoon character going, "I gotta get out of here!" and like running off and their legs do a kind of spiny thing and they dash away and they go under a table. The ur-cowards for me growing up and now are Scooby Doo and Norville ‘Shaggy’ Rogers. Those two were the most positive portrayal of cowardice in media that I grew up seeing.
So as I've grown up, I've seen more and more people being able to talk about mental health issues in a positive way, led, I've got to say, by women and by queer people and by trans people. I think cis men have been really, really well served by all the doors that have been opened by other people. And now we are in a position where more room has been made by the openness of others. Certainly my experience of being able to talk about my anxiety, which I didn't - people go, "Oh, Tim, you're very open about it," I didn't used to be, didn't used to talk about it at all. I would've rather died than admitted to it. And what happened over the years, drip, by drip in the media, in books, on friends' Facebook posts, was people opened up and they talked about it and they said, "Hey, this is my experience." They were honest, and they were unapologetic. And that has created incredible breathing room. The opposite of anxiety, right? It's unlocked that cord around the throat. I've been inspired by other people who've talked about it, and I've gone, "I could do this. They've modelled it for me.”
Where I feel I live now is a world in which it is safe in a lot of environments - not all, but in a lot of spaces - to talk about anxiety, to talk about mental suffering, to talk about distress in a way that will be listened to, in a way that won't be a cause of shame. We have always a long way to go. And we have lots of ways we can be kinder in our communities for sure. But this idea that we live in the most anxious age we've ever lived in is a perennial concern of many people. But I think for us, my suspicion is that part of it comes from greater awareness and a greater willingness to talk. And for me, without being schmaltzy or cheesy about it, it's been hugely liberating. The greatest, greatest, greatest gift to me has been the testimony and openness of others. And I feel genuinely grateful for all the ways in which people have helped me - and society in general - see that there's another way.
HZ: Tim Clare is a poet and performer and the author of the book Coward, which is excellent: very thoroughly researched, achingly personal, and very funny even while it rends your heart. He also makes the podcast Death by A Thousand Cuts, which is about creative writing, and if you’ve been looking for something to help get you going on a writing project, he offers two free courses by podcast: there’s a 100-day writing challenge and a Couch to 80k Writing Boot Camp. Find all his work at timclarepoet.co.uk.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
yips, plural noun, informal: extreme nervousness causing a golfer to miss easy putts.
I know this seems so appropriate for this episode that it cannot be randomly selected, but I assure you it was! Try using ‘yips’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, original music by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor an episode of the show, contact them at multitude.productions/ads.
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