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. 

Gray or grey?

Some definitions of gray or grey indicate that it is a neutral color between black and white. Further that gray is achromatic meaning "possessing no hue" or color. Well I disagree. At least in watercolor, mixed grays have lots of hues. I usually mix a blue, a red and a yellow. I like the idea that colors shouldn't be overmixed so that they still have hints of the individual colors used to create them.


My 1970 reprint of the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary prefers the spelling grey. Under gray, it reads "see grey". Under grey, there are two pages of definitions. Both variants in spelling have validity, according to the OED:

With regard to the question of usage, an inquiry by Dr. Murray in Nov. 1893 elicited a large number of replies, from which it appeared that in Great Britain the form grey is the more frequent in use, notwithstanding the authority of Johnson and later Eng. lexicographers, who have all given the preference to gray.

This gray/grey painting was created on October 11th at about 10 pm facing east. The city glow at the bottom of the painting is from streetlights.