Was the Ancient Mariner a Conservative party member? Coleridge tells us several times that he had a ‘glittering eye’, an infallible sign of a screw loose somewhere. The S.T. Coleridge school of political psychiatry came into its own last weekend when the newspapers were told that Tory party ‘associations are all mad, swivel-eyed loons’. The Wedding Guest in Coleridge’s rime had his own ideas about care in the community: ‘Get thee hence, thou grey-beard Loon,’ he cried, to little enough effect, it must be admitted. But what did he mean by loon?
The Ancient Mariner was not being ‘diagnosed with lunacy’, as Coleridge would certainly not have put it. The poet, adopting a deliberately archaic vocabulary for his ballad, knew from Shakespeare of the ‘cream-fac’d’ variety of loon. Iago, in a drinking song learnt in England (he said), attributes the use of the insult loon to King Stephen himself, whose ‘breeches cost him but a crown, / He held them sixpence all too dear, / With that he called the tailor lown.’ Here loon comes in a form rhyming with clown. When Kenneth Clarke used clown to insult members of Ukip, he clearly meant the circus sort of clown. To Shakespeare, clown did mean ‘jester’, but also retained the meaning of ‘peasant’ or ‘loon’.
Connotations of lunacy in the use of loon obviously came through the influence of the unrelated lunatic, but also through that of loon meaning a bird, the Great Northern Diver. It has a weird cry, which to Henry David Thoreau sounded ‘sometimes singularly human’. Crazy as a loon or drunk as a loon were similes taken not only from the bird’s cry, but also from its wild manner of attempting to extricate itself from danger. The Canadians put the loon on their dollar coin.
So loony as an abbreviation of lunatic took on board all these associations. P.G. Wodehouse was fond of the word looney-bin, which in My Man Jeeves (1919) he, or his publisher, hyper-correctly spelled luny-bin. Most recently, when loon-pants, those short-lived 28-inch flared fashion disasters of 1971, had their day, Lord Feldman, the Conservative deputy chairman, was only five. He can be acquitted of imagining party association members in flared trousers.
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