moon-calf

   Mainly a seventeenth-century expression, applied most famously to Caliban, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The word originally referred to a person misshapen at birth, a monstrosity, the influence of the moon being blamed for such accidents of nature. By the nineteenth century novelists such as Sir Walter Scott and R.L.Stevenson were using the word, vocatively or otherwise, in a watered-down sense to refer to a foolish person. Dickens and Disraeli seem to have interpreted the word as ‘one who moons about, an absent-minded person’. The term would probably only be used in modern times by speakers with a strong literary background. See also Calf, which was used in the seventeenth century as a vaguely affectionate insult.