the.com/double entendre
A sentence with two meanings, one of which you're not allowed to say out loud.
means A word or phrase that can be innocently understood one way and suggestively or slyly another way at the same time.
from Borrowed from French, where 'entendre' meant 'to understand' or 'to hear,' so 'double entendre' literally meant 'double understanding.' Oddly, the phrase is no longer used this way in modern French — it's actually an English invention built from French parts, adopted into English in the 1600s-1700s and then sort of frozen there, like a souvenir that never made it back home.
- origin
- french for double meaning, but french stopped using it
- mechanism
- innocent on first read, filthy on second
- comedy rule
- works only if grandma can laugh too
- mae west
- built an entire career on this device