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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 [note 1] (plural double entendres) is a figure of speech or a particular way of wording that is devised to have a double meaning, one of which is typically obvious, and the other often conveys a message that ...
A double entendre is a spoken phrase that can be understood in either of two ways. The first, literal meaning is an innocent one, while the second, figurative meaning is often ironic or risqué and requires the audience to have some additional knowledge to understand the joke.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky comment in their book Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media that Orwellian doublespeak is an important component of the manipulation of the English language in American media, through a process called dichotomization, a component of media propaganda involving "deeply embedded double standards in the reporting of news."
Adianoeta – a phrase carrying two meanings: an obvious meaning and a second, more subtle and ingenious one (more commonly known as double entendre). Alliteration – the use of a series of two or more words beginning with the same letter. Amphiboly – a sentence that may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous structure.
Examples of word play include puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, double entendres, and telling character names (such as in the play The Importance of Being Earnest, Ernest being a given name that sounds exactly like the adjective earnest).
Japanese wordplay relies on the nuances of the Japanese language and Japanese script for humorous effect, functioning somewhat like a cross between a pun and a spoonerism. Double entendres have a rich history in Japanese entertainment (such as in kakekotoba ) [ 1 ] due to the language's large number of homographs (different meanings for a given ...
The riddle is noted for its double entendre, since to many readers the obvious solution to the riddle is 'penis'. It accordingly provides important evidence for attitudes to gender and sexuality in early medieval England. [2]
For example, the second clause can be read as "fruit travels through the air similar to a banana" or as "certain insects enjoy a banana". This is an example of a garden-path sentence , a phrase that the reader or listener normally begins to parse according to one grammatical structure, and is then forced to back up and reparse when the sentence ...