Today's word, ladies and gentlemen, is spoony. And yes, I've been back in my beloved Victorian novels again. The word is used by Rochester to describe himself in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.
It means to be sentimentally or foolishly amorous. Since it's an adjective, you may even have such concepts as spoonier and spooniest! There are also its derivatives, spoonily and spooniness. But, alas, I could find no origins for the word. Spoony is also dated, meaning those of use writing contemporary fiction had better not let it slip into our prose. The term is listed as informal and was probably Victorian slang.
But its time has come and gone. That happens to so many words, and sometimes it saddens me, because sometimes those words and their usage are so memorable. Take, in Rex Stout's Nero Wolf books, Inspector Cramer's repeated exclamations of, "Nuts!" Then, there is the phrase, "We're in a pickle," used by both Nero and Archie at least once in separate books.
I'm old enough to remember when the banned words, the course words, the common four-letter words were released from the the closet and let loose upon the world. You know the ones. You hear them every day now in conversations everywhere as we let it, "all hang out."
Sometimes, though, considering road rage and today's low level of common courtesy, I think we might be better off, tucking our shirttails back into our trousers and offering, instead, the heartfelt exclamation, "Nuts!"
