A brief examination of the phrase “double entendre”.

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Elvis Presley was of course heavily influenced by blues, and made cover versions of old classics not previously heard outside the black community. I’m sure Elvis fans will tell me which song it was, but I remember a doco mentioning the lyrics of one had to be censored by the record company, a line about the sun shining through a woman’s dress showing everything, but they missed the next line which used innuendo to be more explicit:
“The one-eyed cat is peepin’ into the fish shop”
Since the previous line was taken out, Elvis repeated this line twice instead. I’m sure he knew what it meant.

Somehow sly innuendo is more fun than explicit language. An element of mystique, perhaps, a sense of it being “naughty”, maybe, or knowing you’re part of an in-joke that “square” don’t get. Like a woman in ligerie not quite showing all can be sexier than if completely naked. But then, buth can be valid expressions depending what the artist is going for. Shock value, humor or something else. Shock only works until people get desensitised to it. (the previously-mentioned “I Don’t Want You Back” relies on expletives to express anger).

Chicago was one of the first cities to embrace the new style, and from some accounts it was here that the New Orleans style was first popularly christened “jass.” Back in New Orleans, it was called by such names as “ratty music”, “hot music,” or simply “ragtime” (Sidney Bechet often continued to call his music “ragtime” as late as the 1950s). The style was so different from the ragtime and dance music of the rest of the nation, that a new name was needed to distinguish it. Apparently, the first band billed as playing “jass” was that of trombonist Tom Brown; the term “jass” was rude sexual slang (related to the term “jism”).

People’s morality isn’t getting worse, just more exposed.

Enjoy!

So Eric, is your show syndicated at all? Broadcast online anywhere? I’d love to give it a listen…

Dan

s**t head (offensive? yes.)
feaces head (impolite? yes. requiring censorship? no.)

In cases like this where the meaning of the ‘expletives’ themselves are not offensive, you surely have to take the assumption that we have deliberately created an emotive verbal format outside the bounds of conventional language to allow ourselves to express things that cannot be expressed in purely literal speech.

Geoffrey Hughes, in ‘Swearing’ (penguin books) offers this example:

Rapist
Child Molester

Hughes makes the point that these two insults stigmatize in powerfully anti-social terms, yet still do not have the vitriolic power of the two listed below, because the terms in the second list, though technically less insulting when you consider the actual meanings of the words, have gained a weight of tradition as offensive terms:

B*st**d (Person born of unmarried parents.)
Son of a Bitch (er, that would be a puppy, then?)

It’s frustrating to see the Christian right get into a frenzy over declining morality (and increased promiscuity) when you consider that one in four women in England was a prostitute during the 18th Century.

One thing you don’t hear very often in Cleveland (although I heard a ton of it on a recent trip to New York City) is Frank Zappa: just about half of Zappa’s songs are not playable on American radio frequencies…

Love this post, Eric!

As for Janet Jackson, that incident was rebroadcast here unedited on the 7pm evening news. I think David Letterman summarised it best – “Janet Jackson is now being very contrite. She is pretending to apologise to everyone who is pretending to be offended.”