Muddled Entendres Are Strictly for the Words

Here's some startling news you may have missed, even if you're an avid reader of the tabloids:

Dateline: Ames, Iowa - While attending a Farm Relief event, Secretary of Agriculture Edward T. Schafer was observed decorticating in a field of tall corn.

Dateline: Washington, DC - Belying his straight-laced public persona, Ralph Nader confesses that he has more than occasionally tickled the risibilities of various female staff members.

Dateline: London, England - Disciplinary records at Oxford University reveal that Bill Clinton, while a student there, admitted performing several furtive acts of defenestration in the privacy of his living quarters.

Dateline: Paris, France - Macho man Sylvester (Sly) Stallone was photographed by paparazzi with several male companions at a swish eatery on the Rue du Bac.

Although all of the above "newsbreaks" are fabricated, all of them could be both true and totally innocuous; but it's a safe bet that they raised some eyebrows and hackles among a few of our more prudish readers.

The foregoing ragmag-worthy trash items, in fact, report nothing more salacious than a government official shucking corn, a perennial wannabe making his secretaries giggle, a president-to-be throwing things out of the window, and a he-man movie star breaking bread at a fashionable Left Bank restaurant.

Shame on (some of) you for what you were thinking, but it's one of the sinister aspects of our occasionally idiotic idiom.

Among the many flaws of language are that a word can mean one thing and sound suggestively like something entirely different to those to whom it is an unfamiliar term, and references that have more than one definition.

The deliberate double entendre is a standard tool of the stand-up comic, an indispensable element of sitcoms and the principal ingredient of most cocktail party jokes, but it isn't always used consciously and can occur like a conversational pothole in the path of the unwary.

I have, for example, frequently used the word "pithy" to describe a statement that is both forceful and concise, but I've never been able to say it out loud with a straight face; and I once heard of a girl who couldn't say or hear "intersection" without blushing deeply.

Aside: Who was the insensitive lout who put an "s" in the word lisp?

A dichotomy of mores exists with respect to words that are socially tolerable and those generally frowned upon among "nice" people. Some examples of the latter category appear in this piece and will occasion more than a single "tsk" among certain readers, including all incurable scrupes.

Yet it has always puzzled me that there are so many euphemisms, widely accepted in our songs, stories and small talk, for what is arguably the most offensive word in our idiom. We'll go no further in identifying that term than to cite the once-popular song, "Makin' Whoopee." (Like, what ELSE were they singing about?)

The shifting sands of current parlance are an additional challenge to routine communications. I can clearly remember when grass was something you cut, pot was something you cooked in, cool was a temperature, rather than a value judgment, and "he goes" referred to his progress, rather than his utterances.

An oddity about the Queen's English, as opposed to American dialect, is that it's perfectly appropriate in the U.K. for a young swain to "knock up" (i.e., pay a call on) his girlfriend - clearly a no-no in most segments of our society hereabouts.

And one of our hosts on a long-ago South Africa lecture tour sadly reported that his aged pooch was "farting," (i.e., not feeling well), a ploy frequently used elsewhere to transfer the guilt for a behavioral indiscretion. ("Naughty dog!")

Language, of course, is designed to effect clear communications, but as far back as the Oracle at Delphi and as recently as Bill "Is-is" Clinton, it has often confused, befuddled, misled and (here's another one) titillated the communicatees - as in the instances at the top of this rambling essay.

A classic example of this problem was the 1975 case of Renee Richards, a former member of the men's professional tennis tour, who changed locker rooms after a surgical procedure in Sweden (later adapted by Lorena Bobbitt for an entirely different reason).

Upon returning to the USA, the now "Ms." (Nee "Mr.") Richards was, we are told, temporarily nonplussed when asked by a Customs Agent, "How long have you been abroad?"

(Oh, lighten up, ladies, and spare us your indignant letters - it was just a muddled entendre!)