Double entendre

A double entendre is "a figure of speech or a particular way of wording that is devised to have a double meaning," one meaning plain and the other usually what "would be too socially unacceptable, or offensive to state directly." The phrase is an old French expression for "double understanding" or "ambiguity," and the suggestive English sense follows Dryden's use in 1673. The mechanism is the split audience: a listener "may fail to detect its innuendos," which is why one line plays innocent and knowing at once. The article's examples run from the Exeter Book riddles that read bawdy but answer "an onion" to Odysseus calling himself "No-one," so the Cyclops cries that "No-one has hurt me!"

For the writer it is innuendo engineered for re-readers, a pun aimed at propriety; in dialogue it dates fast, and what passed for wit reads as cliché a generation later.