double-entendre

An 1814 engraving of a double entendre. He: "My sweet honey, I hope you are to be let with the Lodgins!" She: "No, sir, I am to be let alone."

A double entendre (from French: double = double and entendre = to mean, to understand) is a figure of speech in which a spoken phrase is intended to be understood in either of two ways. In most cases, the first meaning is straightforward, while the second meaning is less so; often risqué, inappropriate, or ironic.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a double entendre as especially being used to "convey an indelicate meaning". It is often used to express potentially offensive opinions without the risks of explicitly doing so.

A double entendre may exploit puns to convey the second meaning, but puns are more often used in sentences which do not have a second meaning. Double entendres tend to rely more on multiple meanings of words, or different interpretations of the same primary meaning; they often exploit ambiguity and may be used to introduce it deliberately in a text. For example, in the thriller The Silence of the Lambs, Dr. Hannibal Lecter states he is "having an old friend for dinner" — the statement innocently reads as him having invited the friend to share an evening meal, but awareness of the character's cannibalism suggests that he intends to eat the friend as the meal. Another example of this would be the title of the short story, "The Most Dangerous Game", by Richard Connell, in which the title can refer both to a "game" that is most dangerous to play, and the "game" that is most dangerous to hunt.

In some double entendres, the second meaning may require replacing an "innocent" word by a completely dissimilar "risqué" one, this "key" being suggested only by the context, or by the altered sentence being known to the audience.

Structure

When innuendo is used in a sentence, it could go completely undetected by someone who was not familiar with the hidden meaning, and he or she would find nothing odd about the sentence (aside from other people finding it humorous for seemingly no reason). Perhaps because an innuendo is not considered offensive to those who do not "get" the hidden implication, it is often prevalent in sitcoms and other comedy which would in fact be considered suitable for children. Children would find this comedy funny, but because most children lack understanding of the hidden implication in innuendo, they would find it funny for a completely different reason than most adult viewers. It can also be used to make more socially acceptable sexual humor. Shakespeare's play Much Ado About Nothing used this ploy to present a surface level description of the play as well as a pun on the Elizabethan usage of "nothing" as slang for noticing.^{[citation needed]}

A triple entendre is a rare variation of a double entendre where a phrase can be understood in any of three ways.^{[original research?]} An example of this would be the cover of the 1981 Rush album Moving Pictures. The title could be read to mean transporting or relocating wall paintings or photographs by a moving crew, pictures that invoke emotional (moving) reactions, or a film\movie. Comedian Benny Hill, whose television shows included straightforward sexual gags, has been jokingly called "the master of the single entendre".^[1]

Etymology

Although "double entendre" was a French expression when adopted into English, and although both words are part of modern French, their use together has disappeared in French.^{[citation needed]} Double retains the same meaning in French, and entendre translates to "to hear" but more in the meaning of "understanding." French refers to such phrases with the term double sens (literally "double meaning"),^[2] or double entente, (double or equivocal meaning; a play on words).^[3][vague] Another variation is sous-entendre (verb) or sous-entendu (name), which mean literally "under meaning", that is, with a hidden meaning under the primary meaning.

Usage

Literature

Examples of sexual innuendo and double-entendre occur in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (14th century), in which the Wife of Bath's tale is laden with double entendres. The most famous of these may be her use of the word "queynte" to describe both domestic duties (from the homonym "quaint") and genitalia ("queynte" being a root of the modern English word cunt.)

The title of Sir Thomas More's 1516 fictional work Utopia is a double entendre because of the pun between two Greek-derived words that would have identical pronunciation: with his spelling, it means "no place"^[4] (as echoed later in Samuel Butler's later Erewhon); spelled as the rare word Eutopia, it is pronounced the same^[5] by English-speaking readers, but has the meaning "good place."

The poem Ozymandias by Percy Shelley published in 1818, is an example of ironic double entendre. Looking upon the shattered ruins of a colossus, the traveller reads:

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

The speaker believes that the king's sole intended meaning of "despair" was that nobody could hope to equal his achievements, but the traveler seems to find another meaning — that the reader might "despair" to find that all beings are mortal, that king and peasant alike inevitably share oblivion in the sands of time. This portrayal of an unintended double entendre exemplifies a case of the double entendre as the poet's figure of speech.

In Homer's "The Odyssey", when Odysseus is captured by the Cyclops Polyphemus, he tells the Cyclops that his name is Nohbdy. When Odysseus attacks the Cyclops later that night and stabs him in the eye, the Cyclops runs out of his cave, yelling to the other cyclopes that "Nohbdy's hurt me!", leading the other cyclopes to believe that he said "Nobody's hurt me!", causing them to leave him alone and allow Odysseus and his men to escape. This double entendre uses the false name "Nohbdy" to cause others to think the cyclops said "nobody".

Stage performances

Flax on a distaff

Shakespeare frequently used innuendos in his plays. Indeed, Sir Toby in Twelfth Night is seen saying, in reference to Sir Andrew's hair, that "it hangs like flax on a distaff; and I hope to see a housewife take thee between her legs and spin it off;" the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet says that her husband had told Juliet when she was learning to walk that "Yea, dost thou fall upon thy face? Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit;", or is told the time: "for the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon"; and in Hamlet, Hamlet torments Ophelia with a series of sexual puns, viz. "country" (similar to "cunt").

In the UK, starting in the 19th century, Victorian morality disallowed innuendo in the theatre as being unpleasant, particularly for the ladies in the audience. In music hall songs, on the other hand, innuendo remained very popular. Marie Lloyd's song 'She Sits Among The Cabbages And Peas' is an example of this. (Music hall in this context is to be compared with Variety, the one common, low-class and vulgar; the other demi-monde, worldly and sometimes chic.) In the 20th century there began to be a bit of a crackdown on lewdness, including some prosecutions. It was the job of the Lord Chamberlain to examine the scripts of all plays for indecency. Nevertheless, some comedians still continued to get away with it. Max Miller, famously, had two books of jokes, a white book and a blue book, and would ask his audience which book they wanted to hear stories from. If they chose the blue book, it was their own choice and he could feel reasonably secure he was not offending anyone.

Television shows

In Britain, innuendo humour did not transfer to radio or cinema at first, but eventually and progressively it began to filter through from the late 1950s and 1960s on. Particularly significant in this respect were the Carry On series of films and the BBC radio series Round the Horne, although this humour is carried because of the apparent "nonsense" language that the protagonists use but in fact are having a "rude" conversation in Polari (gay slang). Spike Milligan, writer of The Goon Show, has remarked that a lot of blue innuendo came from servicemen's jokes, which were understood by most of the cast (who had all served as enlisted soldiers) and many of the audience, but which would pass over the heads of most of the BBC producers and directors, who were mostly "Officer class."

Sexual innuendo and double-entendre are now common in British sitcoms and radio comedy such as I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue and Round the Horne. For example, in Are You Being Served?, Mrs. Slocombe makes frequent references to her "pussy", such as "It's a wonder I'm here at all, you know. My pussy got soakin' wet. I had to dry it out in front of the fire before I left." Someone unfamiliar with sexual slang might find this statement funny simply because of the references to her pussy cat, whereas generally a viewer would be expected to detect the innuendo ("pussy" is sexual slang for vagina).

In 1968, the office of the Lord Chamberlain ceased to have responsibility for censoring live entertainment, thanks to the Theatres Act 1968. By the 1970s innuendo had become widely pervasive across much of the British media.

Movies

Bawdy double entendres, such as "I'm the kinda girl who works for Paramount by day, and Fox all night", and "I feel like a million tonight — but only one at a time", were the trademark of Mae West, in her early-career vaudeville performances as well as in her later plays and movies.

Double entendres are popular in modern movies, as a way to conceal adult humor in a work aimed at general audiences. The James Bond films are rife with such humour. For example, in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), when Bond is disturbed by the telephone while in bed with a Danish girl, he explains to Moneypenny that he's busy brushing up on his Danish. Moneypenny responds in kind by pointing out that Bond was known as "a cunning linguist", a play on the word "cunnilingus". This was further parodied in Austin Powers in Goldmember: "You may be a cunning linguist, but I'm a master debater!" (the latter sounds like "masturbator").

Songs

Double entendres are very common in the titles and lyrics pop songs. To cite only a few examples:

• The refrain of We Walk, a song by The Ting Tings, "When nothing makes you feel good, then nothing makes you feel good," plays on context-dependent meaning of the phrase "nothing makes you feel good"; the first meaning that there isn't anything that makes one feel good, and the second meaning that nothing (in it's literal sense, the absence of anything), makes one feel good.
• The title of the song "Big Ball's in Cowtown", a song by Hoyle Nix, and its more modern inspired cousin "Big Balls", by the Australian rock band AC/DC, playing on the two meanings of "balls": social dance events and testicles.
• The title of the song "The Jack" by the same band, playing on two meanings of "jack": a card game and (in Australian slang) gonorrhea.
• The title of the Blink-182 album "Take off your pants and jacket" is a double entendre relying on different interpretations of the final word, which could also be understood as "jack it", a dysphemism for masturbation.
• The title of the song "If U Seek Amy" by Britney Spears, a double entendre that relies on it sounding like "F-U-C-K me".

Social interaction

One instance of double entendre involves responding to a seemingly innocuous sentence that could have a sexual meaning with the phrase "that's what she said". An example might be if one were to say "It's too big to fit in my mouth" upon being served a large sandwich, someone else could say "That's what she said," as if statement was a reference to oral sex. This phrase was used in the "Wayne's World" Saturday Night Live skits, and was a recurring joke on the US sitcom The Office. The phrase "...as the actress said to the bishop" can be used in a similar way.

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Double entendres

Look up double entendre in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Albur
• Coincidence
• Doublespeak
• Euphemism
• Paraprosdokian
• Pun
• Spoonerism
• Word play

References

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