A foolish, gullible person; a simpleton. This expression comes from the well-known nursery rhyme “Simple Simon met a pieman going to the fair,” in turn a rhymed version of a tale from an eighteenth-century chapbook. By 1785 Grose’s dictionary defined the term as “a natural, a silly fellow.” James Joyce used it in Ulysses (1922): “I looked so simple in the cradle they christened me simple Simon.” However, it is probably obsolescent.