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A simpleton is a person you are calling stupid — someone with a very low level of intelligence, in the speaker’s judgment. It is an old-fashioned insult, a little like a storybook name: you meet simpletons in fairy tales and old novels more than in the school corridor. Using it about a real person today is rude, and it punches down. The word was built to sound like a surname, as if “Mr Simpleton” were a character type. Simple can be a compliment (“a simple answer”). Simpleton never is.
傻瓜、笨蛋（舊式罵人話，童話裡較常見；拿來叫真人很失禮）
組成simple + -ton, the -ton you see on English surnames, as if it were a made-up family name. French simplet and Italian semplicione play a similar “little simple one” game, but those are not English words.
同家族的字
- simplethe first piece
- simple-mindedthe adjective that sits next to this insult
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
simpletonnoun/ˈsɪmpəltən/
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derogatoryinformalA simple-minded person lacking common sense.
- The stranger had crossed a sacred line. He had mentioned the men's mothers. Nothing could get him out of a beating now, even the fact that he was obviously a simpleton. Albeit a simpleton with a good vocabulary.
- Baron Cohen’s new creation (and the previous ones, too) has its roots in Groucho characters like Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding, Otis B. Driftwood, and Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff, and the concept of a pompous simpleton running a rogue nation has obvious parallels to Duck Soup’s Rufus T. Firefly, who leads the country of Fredonia to a needless and highly preventable war.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。