Old English calu (def. calw-e) < West Germanic kalwo-, whence also Middle Low German kale, Middle Dutch cāle (calu, genitive caluwes), Old High German chalo (def. chalwe, chalawe), Middle High German kal (kalwe), German kahl, by Kluge thought to be cognate with Lithuanian gŏlŭ naked, blank; but not improbably an adoption of Latin calv-us bald. Compare Irish and Gaelic calbh bald.
1. Bald, without hair. Obs.
2. a. Of birds: Unfledged, without feathers.
b. Applied to the down of unfledged birds; and so, to the down on a youth's cheek and chin.
3. fig. Inexperienced, raw, ‘unfledged’. (OED)
"I have gone back to 'Middlemarch' every five years or so, my emotional response to it evolving at each revisiting. In my judgmental twenties, I thought that Ladislaw, with his brown curls and his callow artistic dabbling, was not entirely deserving of Dorothea; by forty, I could better measure the appeal of his youthful energies and Byronic hairdressing, at least to his middle-aged creator, who was fifty-three when the book was published."
- Rebecca Mead, "Middlemarch and Me: What George Eliot teaches us", February 14 & 21, 2011, The New Yorker
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