In fact, the English language is full of what linguists call
“homonyms“, which are strictly speaking two or more words that have identical spelling and pronunciation, but different meanings (eg to tell a lie vs to lie down).
Just think of the German Teekesselchen game.
Sometimes the term “homonym” is also used more broadly to additionally encompass both “
homographs” (words that have the same spelling, but different pronunciation, eg lead (metal) /lead (to guide)) and “
homophones” (words that have the same pronunciation, but different spelling, eg flower/flour).
Homonyms/-graphs/-phones are the prerequisite for puns, which are exploiting multiple meanings or similar sounds of words to create humour, thereby enriching language and communication, and are often extremely difficult, if not impossible to translate. (eg “I hope that the content of this post will leave you content.
”)
One facet of the beauty of TSE is that this forum is full of creative word play and witty puns. As a non-native speaker you will naturally fail to notice many of them. And even Kiwis, let alone native English speakers from other parts of the world, will not pick up some of the allusions due to not being socialised in Australia or due to differences in vocab/pronunciation/spelling, while in turn having their own unique word plays & puns. And trust me, not even the average Aussie native speaker on this forum will get all of them.
Speaking of Kiwis: When I was on a scholarship in NZ 25 years ago, I was really confused the first time someone told me to “go to the lift”, but I couldn’t find an elevator. Turned out that in NZ English, the pronunciation of “left” is very similar to that of AE/BE “lift”. Māori vowels, on the other hand, are pretty much pronounced the same way as in German (and Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Bahasa…).
What Rise from the ashes was alluding to with his association of a spicy (bodily) organ, was basically a special form of homonym use called “
double entendre” (= “a figure of speech or a particular way of wording that is devised to have a double meaning, of which one is typically obvious, whereas the other often conveys a message that would be too socially awkward, sexually suggestive, or offensive to state directly”, definition from Wikipedia below), even though in this case the sexually suggestive meaning had been totally unintended by you, when you happened to subtitle that picture of the scantily clad organist with “organ can be spicy”, as in German the words for the musical instrument and the bodily organ are not identical and you obviously weren’t aware they are in English.
The same goes for Esq.111’s presumably innocent greeting “Morning Rise” which the addressee evidently read as an innuendo to the state a certain organ of his finds itself in, when he wakes up, comparable to the German word Latte, which for guys not only relates to their morning coffee, if you know what I mean, wink wink, nudge nudge…
And while we are at it, here is a cartoon on the same topic:
View attachment 42487
William Shakespeare was very fond of double entendres with sexual subtexts, by the way.
And since you mentioned Hannibal Lecter in another post:
“I do wish we could chat longer, but… I’m having an old friend for dinner. Bye.”
It is a fascinating topic, isn’t it? Enjoy perusing the below Wikipedia article, which lists plenty of other English language examples, taken from literature, film and music. Obviously these differ from double entendres in other languages, although sometimes they even work in translation.
en.m.wikipedia.org
A
double entendre (plural
double entendres) is a
figure of speech or a particular way of wording that is devised to have a double meaning, of which one is typically obvious, whereas the other often conveys a message that would be too socially awkward, sexually suggestive, or offensive to state directly.
[2][3]
Lodgings to Let, an 1814 engraving featuring 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 may exploit
puns or
word play to convey the second meaning. Double entendres generally rely 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. Sometimes a
homophone can be used as a pun. When three or more meanings have been constructed, this is known as a "triple entendre", etc.
[4]
Contents
Etymology
According to the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression comes from the rare and obsolete
Frenchexpression, which literally meant "double meaning" and was used in the senses of "double understanding" or "ambiguity" but acquired its current suggestive twist in English after being first used in 1673 by
John Dryden.
[5][6][7] The phrase has not been used in French for centuries and would be ungrammatical in modern French. No exact equivalent exists in French, whose similar expressions (mot/expression à) double entente and (mot/expression à) double sens do not have the suggestiveness of the English expression.
[6]
Structure
A person who is unfamiliar with the hidden or alternative meaning of a sentence may fail to detect its
innuendos, aside from observing that others find it humorous for no apparent reason. Innuendo is often used in
sitcoms and other
comedy where some in the audience may enjoy the humour while being oblivious to its secondary meaning.
A triple entendre is a phrase that can be understood in any of three ways, such as in the back cover of the 1981
Rush album
Moving Pictures which shows a
moving companycarrying paintings out of a building while people are shown being emotionally moved and a film crew makes a "
moving picture" of the whole scene.
[8]
Usage
Literature
In
Homer's The
Odyssey, when
Odysseus is captured by the
Cyclops Polyphemus, he tells the Cyclops that his name is Oudeis (ουδεις = No-one). 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 "No-one has hurt me!", which leads the other Cyclopes to take no action under the assumption that Polyphemus blinded himself by accident, allowing Odysseus and his men to escape.
The first page of the poem "The Wanderer" found in the
Exeter Book.
Some of the earliest double entendres are found in the
Exeter Book, or Codex exoniensis, at
Exeter Cathedral in
England. The book was copied around AD 975. In addition to the various poems and stories found in the book, there are also numerous riddles. The Anglo-Saxons did not reveal the answers to the riddles, but they have been answered by scholars over the years. Some riddles were double-entendres, such as
Riddle 25 ("I am a wondrous creature: to women a thing of joyful expectation, to close-lying companions serviceable. I harm no city-dweller excepting my slayer alone. My stem is erect and tall––I stand up in bed––and whiskery somewhere down below. Sometimes a countryman's quite comely daughter will venture, bumptious girl, to get a grip on me. She assaults my red self and seizes my head and clenches me in a cramped place. She will soon feel the effect of her encounter with me, this curl-locked woman who squeezes me. Her eye will be wet.") which suggests the answer "a
penis" but has the correct answer "an
onion".
[9]
Examples of sexual
innuendo and double-entendre occur in
Geoffrey Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales (14th century), in which the
Wife of Bath's Tale is laden with double entendres. These include her use of the word "queynte" to describe both domestic duties (from the homonym "quaint") and genitalia ("queynte" being the root of "
cunt", a
vulgar English word for
vulva).
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"
[10]); spelled as the rare word "Eutopia", it is pronounced the same
[11] by
English-speaking readers, but has the meaning "good place".
Stage performances
Flax on a distaff
Shakespeare frequently used double entendres in his plays.
Sir Toby Belch in
Twelfth Night says of
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 by
Mercutio: "for the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the
prick of noon"; and in
Hamlet,
Hamlet publicly torments
Ophelia with a series of sexual puns, including "country matters" (similar to "
cunt"). The title of Shakespeare's play
Much Ado About Nothing is a pun on the Elizabethan use of "no-thing" as slang for
vagina.
[12][13]
In the UK, starting in the 19th century,
Victorian morality disallowed sexual innuendo in the theatre as being unpleasant, particularly for the ladies in the audience. In
music hall songs, on the other hand, this kind of innuendo remained very popular.
Marie Lloyd's song "She Sits Among the Cabbages and Peas" is an example of this. In the early 20th century restrictions were placed on lewdness in performances, 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 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, he could blame the audience for the lewdness to follow (in the UK, "blue"
colloquially refers to sexual content, as in "blue jokes", "blue movies" etc.).
Radio and television
In
The Office,
Michael Scott (played by
Steve Carell, pictured) often points out unintentional double entendres with the phrase "
that's what she said".
In the United States,
innuendo and double entendre were only lightly used in radio media until the 1980s when the
Howard Stern Show began to push the envelope of what was acceptable on the
radio through use of double entendre and ironies. This garnered so much attention it spawned an entire genre of radio called "
shock jock radio" where DJs will push the limits of what is an "acceptable" double entendre to use over-the-air as the Federal Communications Commission has been known to hand out large fines for the use of double entendre on radio if they deem it to be in violation of their standards.
[14]
In Britain, innuendo humour began to transfer to radio and
cinema in the late 1950s. Particularly significant in this respect were the
Carry On series of films and the
BBC radio series
Round the Horne; although some of Round the Horne appeared to be nonsense language, the protagonists were sometimes having "rude" conversations in
Polari (gay slang). Round the Horne depended heavily on innuendo and double entendre, the show's name itself being a triple entendre, a play on the name of its central actor
Kenneth Horne and those around him, the sailor's expression "going round the horn" (i.e.
Cape Horn), and the fact that "horn" is slang for an
erection.
Spike Milligan, writer of
The Goon Show, remarked that a lot of "blue" (i.e. sexual) innuendo came from servicemen's jokes, which most of the cast understood (they all had been soldiers) and many of the audience understood, but which passed over the heads of most of the Senior BBC producers and directors, most of whom were "Officer class".
[15]
In 1968, the office of the
Lord Chamberlain ceased to have responsibility for censoring live
entertainment, after the
Theatres Act 1968. By the 1970s, innuendo had become widely used across much of the British broadcast media, including
sitcoms and
radio comedy, such as
I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. For example, in the 1970s TV comedy series
Are You Being Served?, Mrs. Slocombe frequently referred to her pet cat as her "pussy", apparently unaware of how easily her statement could be misinterpreted, 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 sodden cat, whereas others would find further humour in the innuendo ("pussy" being
sexual slang for
vulva).
[16]
Modern comedies, such as the US version of
The Office, often do not hide the addition of sexual innuendos into the script; for example, main character
Michael Scott often deploys the phrase "
that's what she said" after another character's innocent statement, to turn it retroactively into a sexual pun.
[17]
On The Scott Mills Show on
BBC Radio 1, listeners are asked to send in clips from radio and TV with double meanings in a humorous context, a feature known as "Innuendo Bingo". Presenters and special guests fill their mouths with water and listen to the clips, and the last person to spit the water out with laughter wins the game.
[18][19]
Movies
)
Mae West was famous for her risqué double entendres
Double entendres are popular in modern movies, as a way to conceal adult humour 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 is busy "brushing up on a little Danish". Moneypenny responds by pointing out that Bond was known as "a cunning linguist", a play on the word "cunnilingus". In the final scene of Moonraker, while Bond is taking Dr Holly Goodhead "round the world one more time", Q says to Sir Frederick Gray, "I think he's attempting re-entry, sir". In The World Is Not Enough(1999), while in bed with Dr Christmas Jones, Bond tells her "I thought Christmas only comes once a year". Other obvious examples include Pussy Galorein Goldfinger and Holly Goodhead in Moonraker. The double entendres of the Bond films were parodied in the Austin Powers series.
Bawdy double entendres, such as "I'm the kinda girl who works for Paramount by day, and Fox all night", and (from the movie Myra Breckinridge) "I feel like a million tonight – but only one at a time", are typical of the comedy writing of Mae West, for her early-career vaudeville performances as well as for her later plays and movies.
MusicDouble entendres are very common in the titles and lyrics of pop songs, such as "If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me" by The Bellamy Brothers. By one interpretation, the person being talked to is asked if they would be offended; by the other interpretation, they are asked if they would press their body against the person doing the talking.[20]
Singer and songwriter Bob Dylan, in his somewhat controversial song "Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35", repeats the line "Everybody must get stoned". In context, the phrase refers to the punishment of execution by stoning, but on another level it means to "get stoned", a common slang term for being high on cannabis. In their song "Big Balls" on the album Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, AC/DC the chorus "we've got big balls" can be read as referring to either formal dances or testicles. During the 1940s, Benny Bell recorded several "party records" that contained double entendre including "Everybody Wants My Fanny".[21]
Social interactionDouble entendres can arise in the replies to inquiries. The clichéd phrase "Said the actress to the bishop", as well as "that's what she said", can be used to remark on a sentence said by another which was not intended as a double entendre but nevertheless could be interpreted with a double meaning, one of them sexual.[unreliable source?][22] |
. 
or 
the German word for a mallard duck)? Love it!
