Odd the way Matt’s surname looks and is pronounced. It LOOKS like “Groaning” but is pronounced “Gaining” (from Facebook)

The oe was actually ö, so Groening was Gröning. Which in standard German should be pronounced more like Grerning, but in some German dialects, such as Swabian (Schwäbisch) an ö is pronounced more like an English short e or (depending on the consonants around it) a long a. I think this happens because in Standard High German the ö is a diphthong, but if you take the diph out of the thong (or the thong off the dip) that ö would be pronounced like the double e in the German “Schnee” (meaning snow) or the English “say” (meaning say). So apparently there were a lot of Swabian emigrants in the stretch of Canada where Matt Groening’s German father’s family had settled. I know there were lots of Swabians in Ontario, and I’d explain how it is I know that, but this is already the single dullest paragraph ever written about Matt Groening, so why ruin it.