loon

   ‘You old loon’ occurs as a friendly vocative in The Business of Loving, by Godfrey Smith. Macbeth, on the other hand, is being insulting when he greets a servant as ‘thou cream-fac’d loon’. For Shakespeare the word meant a worthless rogue, an idler, especially one of low birth. Later the word came to mean a clown or lout, though it could also be used of a man or boy without particular meaning. It was fitting that Shakespeare made Macbeth use the word, since it is thought to be of Scottish origin. It was in use by the mid-fifteenth century, having possibly come from Old Norse. In modern American slang there is the expression ‘as crazy as a loon’, which the editor of the New Dictionary of American Slang connects with the bird called the loon. The earlier name of the bird, however, was ‘loom’, and although its clumsiness and loud cry may have given rise to the American expression, it could have had nothing to do with the Shakespearean meaning of loon. To both British and American speakers, loon is strengthened in its association with craziness because it recalls words like ‘lunacy’, ‘lunatic’.