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Sat 19 Jan, 2013 05:27 am
"One year, I hid John's pricey bike, making him think it had been stolen.
"Goddammit!" he hollered as he hurtled his bike helmet across the apartment in frustration.
"April Fools!" I said.
The next year, oh boy, he got me back good. We were fooling around -- I mean a moaner of a roll in the darkness -- and John called out a name. "Beth! Beth!”
His old girlfriend.
Twas I who went went hurtling across the room that time.
I’ve always enjoyed that about John: he can laugh at himself. And he can laugh me. Inside that beautiful body, I recognized a soul: a modest (yes, really), smart, steady-yet-fun soul."
In the fourth paragraph, I don't understand the phrase "a moaner of a roll".
What's the purpose of John calling his old girlfriend's name?
In the last paragraph but one, there seems a misspelling of the word "Twas" and there are two "went". What does this sentence mean?
Moaner of a roll is no kind of stock phrase. It appears to me that the author (a woman) was suggesting that they were involved in sexual play, perhaps foreplay, which was becoming very heated. She had tricked him with an April fool's joke by hiding his bicycle, so he fooled her in the same manner by calling out his old girlfriend's name. Twas is a contraction of "it was." Technically, i suppose, there should have been an apostrophe before the word--'Twas. However, people often leave that off. As for seeing "went" twice, it appears just to have been an error.
Are you bringing posts from an online forum here to be deciphered?
@Setanta,
Thank you very much Setanta!
I'm actually translating this book
Until I say Goodbye into Chinese. Most of the questions I asked here come from the book I translate. I've so far translated 6 English books into Chinese, and this is the seventh one, which, in my opinion, is also the most interesting one.
Thank you very much again for answering these questions. It helps me a lot and I learn a lot.
@Justin Xu,
I am happy to help you. If that book had the word "went" in it twice in a row, the editor was not doing his job.
@Setanta,
Quote:Moaner of a roll is no kind of stock phrase.
Happily, English speakers are not required to stick to 'stock phrases'.
"A roll in the hay" is a common collocation meaning having an active bout of sexual play. A 'moaner of a roll' would just be a
really active bout of sexual play.
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