Moaning is, of course, not an activity peculiar to the English. Woody Allen once said, in response to Noam Chomsky, ‘Language may be innate, but whining is acquired.’ Actually, whining is innate or, at least, certainly universal. But there does seem to be something distinctively English about the kind of whining involved in both weather-speak and racing-talk moaning rituals – a sort of grumpy and apathetic stoicism; complaining endlessly about unsatisfactory states of affairs, but in a resigned manner, without any real expectation that things could be improved, and certainly without any
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