(Sorry for taking so long to post again - I’ve been away.)
What would you call a person who’s always complaining?
1. a moaner-groaner
2. a moan-and-groaner
3. a moaner-and-groaner
4. a pain in the arse
See, I’ve been told I’m always complaining.
Of course I am.
God only knows, there’s more than enough to complain about: AI, geoengineering, through-the-roof energy bills, toxic everything, rolling apocalypse…
Foto de Niranjan _ Photographs en Unsplash
But you’re so negative, they say. Where attention goes, energy flows. What you focus on expands. You need to see the glass half-full, not half-empty.
Bla bla bla bla bla.
I KNOW.
But I LOVE moaning and groaning.
It’s such a brilliant example of Stuff English Does.
First of all, how cool is it that we can actually say ‘moan and groan’ instead of boring old ‘complain’.
It’s so much more expressive.
And it rhymes.
English absolutely loves rhymes and it makes them all the time, being jam-packed with words that chime together in a vivid, humorous or wry way, as if they were always meant for each other.
Name and blame
Meet and greet
Wine and dine
Slice and dice
Pay and display
(These are just a few examples that follow the moan and groan pattern: verb + verb). We’ll be looking at lots of other rhyming creations here in the Café because, as you may have guessed, I’m obsessed with them.)
Another thing English does is to turn verbs (actions) into agent nouns (an agent noun is a person or thing that performs an action) by adding the suffix –er (a suffix is a thing you stick on the end of a word to change its function.)
As in: garden gardener train trainer sing singer.
-er is one of the most productive suffixes in English, meaning you can add it to more or less anything, and so it generates bazillions of words.
So you could be a moaner. And you could be a groaner.
But what about the double whammy?
At first, moan-and-groaner sounded right to me, moan and groan being perceived as a lexical unit – a lexicalised item that is felt to be joined together into a set phrase that functions like a single word.
So we add the –er to the unit as a whole.
(But there’s a whole subset of phrases that do something bizarrely different (more on that later in the series.)
A wine-and-diner sounds right. A name-and-blamer too. And slice-and-dicer. Or do they? The more I repeat the different options to myself, the more right (or wrong) all of them sound.
And then ‘rock’n’roll’ comes into my head.
Okay, so it isn’t a rhyme but an alliteration (when each word begins with the same letter), which English also absolutely adores.
But it’s the same principle. Rock-n-roll is felt to be a unit, so we have rock-n-rollers.
Alright: moan’n’groaner it is.
But now something else is hovering at the edge of my mind.
A snippet of music comes.
Rocka rolla
Then a lyric.
Rocka rolla woman
Got it.
Rocka rolla woman
For a rocka rolla man
And for once – yay! – I instantly remember the band: Judas Priest.
A quick check on YouTube to confirm.
I’m a moana groana woman.
(for a moana groana man)
Done. (and dusted).
Love, Love, Love this. I’m looking forward to the next one already 😀