CAITIFF/ˈkeɪtɪf/
A contemptible or cowardly person.
This word is archaic, so if you say it with a straight face you might even get away with the insult. It’s also a word that — like many in the lexicon — has come down in the world. It started out, sometime before 1300, to mean a captive. It came through French from Latin captivum, with the same sense (captive comes from the same Latin word by a later re-borrowing, again through French, so it and caitiff make a doublet).
As captives were not in the best of circumstances, caitiff began to mean a wretched or miserable person. Chaucer uses it several times in the Canterbury Tales, as in the Knight’s Tale: “And now I am so caitiff and so thrall / That he that is my mortal enemy / I serve him as his squier poorely”. [thrall: enslaved; squier: squire]. The sense then shifted further towards contempt, implying a mixture of misery and wickedness, and then to the sense of cowardly. Later it became a staple of those historical writers seeking to gain some antique credibility through choice of language (Sir Walter Scott comes especially to mind).
