Mooning

02/09/12, 9:45 pm, looking east

The season of Valentine's Day and love made me think of the word "mooning" and not the kind that involves dropping one's pants. Here's a definition of mooning from the Free Dictionary as related to love:

to yearn or pine as if infatuated

And, I just looked it up in the American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition, and it is exactly the same. That sent me to the Oxford English Dictionary (1970 reissue) which has six pages of moon-related words including moonblind, moonish, moonlighty, and moony. There is a set of moon-word meanings that play on this definition:

Inclined to moon or act in a listless, aimless manner; given to mooning; stupidly dreamy

In other words, moonstruck, or affected by a mental obsession, or injured by sleeping in the moon's rays. I was moonstruck by this view of Mars and the just-past-full moon draped with a gauzy cloud and a prism of color.