moonbeam

noun

Etymology: Compound of moon + beam.

1. A ray or shaft of moonlight.

   “Holonym: moonlight”

   “Be kinde and curteous to this gentleman, / Hop in his walkes, and gambole in his eyes, / Feede him with Apricocks, and Dewberries, / With purple Grapes, greene figges, and Mulberries, / The hony bagges ſteale from the humble Bees, / And for night tapers, croppe their waxen thighes, / And light them with at the fiery Glowe-wormes eyes, / To haue my loue to bedde, and to ariſe, / And pluck the wings, from painted Butterflies, / To fanne the Moone-beames from his ſleeping eyes, / Nod to him Elues, and doe him curteſies.”

2. Any of various Australasian lycaenid butterflies of the genus Philiris.
3. Someone who tends to be dreamy and prone to unrealistic romanticism.

   “While you're responding to the dithering confusing Lynda is causing in the bus depot, you're absorbing the emotions between mother and child. Darcy is often very grownup around her mother, as if she knew that Lynda is a bit of a moonbeam and needs looking after.”

   “Dreaming of the mountain was for moonbeams, he told me, not for people who had been born up there.”

4. A goal or aspiration that appears attractive but is ultimately insubstantial.

   “Therefore it has always seemed clear to me, and that has been the decision of the Senate for many years before when we have had these questions stoutly contested, that where the direction (which is legislation, of course, just as the appropriation is) is confined to the appropriation, to the expenditure of the money appropriated, which can not be paid out of the Treasury without the consent of Congress, Congress may say that it shall be paid for moonbeams, if it pleases, although the Constitution of the United States itself might say that no money should be paid for buying moonbeams.”

   “So much for moonbeams and politics.”