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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Can any of you Frenchophones out there tell me if this is true in French or not?
Une phrase à double entrée. ¶ What does à double entrée mean here? Does it mean there are two ways of looking at it ? [answered: yes]
It looks like a malapropism, and if it makes sense to those committing it (here the original auteur, the queryer and the responder), it might be an eggcorn in French. I think that in English it is much less likely to be an eggcorn and more likely to be simply a malapropistic substitution of one imperfectly-understood French word for another. I could be persuaded, however. (Non-Francophones do generally know what entrees are.)
suddenly understanding all the hidden meanings and double entrees.
is that a double entree ?? double intendo ? whats that work I want …. It is not that I don’t understand your point Fuzzy, it is that I still think you are …
Are there quippy, zippy word punny people here? I love the turn of phrase, the play of words and a double entree. Is there a place here for me?
When you talk about circumcision, male circumcision is usually implied. And since you already referred to FGM (female circumstances), I had no reason to expect a double entree, I presumed you meant male circumcision
I expect there are a good many more out there, but I got tired of sifting through the (literal) culinary entries.
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(In the serendipity department, work < word works pretty well when you’re searching for a word, and circumstances is a nice —likely-silicistical— malapropism under those circumcisions. If a phrase fails to mean anything in two ways, does that make it a double-nintendo?)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2013-11-03 15:33:09)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Google Translate renders “Une phrase à double entrée” as “A sentence double entry”, which makes no sense, thus impelling us to presume an error, eggcornish or otherwise—until we realize that “double entry” is a type of bookkeeping, which opens up the possibility, however slight, that the phrase was perfectly clear and meaningful, with no error or substitution, to a French bookkeeper. Google translate yields, for “Une phrase à double entendre”, “a sentence double entender”, which doesn’t necessarily clarify the picture.
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A double entry phrase is probably not a malapropism or eggcorn in French, although it certainly has eggcorn overtones. The major problem is that double entendre is now strictly English, and probably has been for centuries. Phrase à double entrée is rare on the web, but phrase à double entendre is almost nonexistant. It’s oddly formed, after all: entendre is an infinitive. There is a common expression using _à double entrée_ with reference to a crossed table or contingency table, where all entries are categorized by line as well as by column (oops, I see that well-described by Dixon as a bookeeping technique). Using phrase à double entrée is a clever reference to that, based on the added sense of ‘entry’ as gaining access to the meaning of a poem or other text.
But it’s got a good chance of being an eggcorn in English. The question then becomes, is it a double meaning or a two-course meal to the perps?
Props for “double-nintendo”. That one may come in handy on this board.
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Double-entry bookkeeping is not about records that can be accessed by line as well as by column, if I remember anything from a bookkeeping course nearly 50 years ago. Isn’t it making one entry for the amount in question as a credit of some sort, and a corresponding entry as a debit, so that the books will balance?
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The originally quoted discussion (here ) was apparently about a phrase with two meanings. Could you enlighten us, Tocayo, about the two meanings of Pour lui, “la blonde, c’est l’Autre” that were intended by the author? And might the author have been consciously playing with a phrase similar to the (French-derived) English double-entendre ? Seeing the phrase as accessible from two directions (by line and by column) is actually a pretty nice analogy to construing it with two meanings.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2013-11-04 15:06:08)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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The original was a magazine article from the French Elle, about the ‘meaning’ of blonde hair. The auteur of la blonde, c’est l’Autre was not making any kind of double-entendre. He was not making much of a point at all – the article is very painfully Cosmo to tell you the truth. Here’s the paragraph in question; you asked for it:
Guillaume, aged 30, is going out with a brunette, but has a lot to say about blondes. For him, “blondes are the Other.” A sentence that can be looked at in two ways. “They are the Other in the sense that, mathematically, most people go out with a brunette rather than a blonde. But they are also the opposite sex. Girl in all her essence, as opposed to brown-haired boy full of testosterone. We imagine her nicer, more approachable, less domineering than the brunette. The blonde is automatically pretty, because, after all, she’s blonde!” “I must say,” continues William, “that, for me, everything which is not brunette is blonde”. That puts it all in perspective. “And then there’re real blondes that have [brunette carpets], so what’s a real blonde?”. Boys are asking these questions … And they are right! 30% of blondes are bleached brunettes. And it is they who attract the most glances. No doubt because their artificial colour clearly indicates their willingness to please.
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DavidTuggy wrote:
Double-entry bookkeeping is not about records that can be accessed by line as well as by column, if I remember anything from a bookkeeping course nearly 50 years ago. Isn’t it making one entry for the amount in question as a credit of some sort, and a corresponding entry as a debit, so that the books will balance?
FWIW, that is also my understanding of the meaning of the term.
Tocayo…
Sometimes I wish I had a few Tocayos; it seems sort of warm and friendly. But alas, with a name like Dixon…
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Maybe there’s a Mason out there somewhere …
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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DavidTuggy wrote:
Maybe there’s a Mason out there somewhere …
That won’t do. I’ve gotta draw the line somewhere!
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I’m curious—how does one say in French what we mean by “double entendre” in English?
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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kem wrote:
I’m curious—how does one say in French what we mean by “double entendre” in English?
Google Translate yields “double sens” as the French translation of “double entendre”.
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Double entendre sounds a lot naughtier. Otherwise why pick a French word for it? Double meaning would do fine.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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