I am trying to translate into French the poetic text "The Firstborn", by British author Laurie Lee, a text about the birth of his (second) daughter – Jesse/Jessy – on 30th September 1963. He writes:
"New-born, of course, she looked already a centenarian, tottering on the brink of an old crone's grave, exhausted, shrunken, bald as Votaire, mopping, mowing and twisting wrinkled claws in speechless spasms of querulous doom."
Obviously, the poet plays with/on (?) the verb phrase "to mop and mow", whose meaning I cannot find on any online dictionary… that is the problem with phrases… very often, dictionaries give you the meaning of words, rarely phrases!
(Stupid websites: when you enter a search, they all raise their hands: "Me! Me! Ask me!", like eager students… and when you click on the websites, they just answer "I don't know!"!!!)
I am asking you, people, what, then, since – luckily – people are more knowledgeable than websites, is the meaning of the verb phrase "to mop and mow"?
Obviously nothing to do with "to mop your brow" and "to mow the lawn"… ?!
Best Answer
The full OED entry for mop (Brit. regional in later use) is...
You'll have to wade through a lot of hits for some eponymous "Arcade Puzzle Game" if you Google the phrase, but I assume the meaning is now clear enough.
Actually, I Googled far enough to discover that it goes back at least to Shakespeare's The Tempest:
("modernised" here as ...tripping over his own toes, making funny faces)
OED says mop was "apparently formed by inversion" from mow = make a grimace (cognate with French moue = mouth, leading to English moue = pout). And yeah - babies do scowl and pout!