892: double entendre May 18, 2017

English has a large amount of vocabulary that comes from French at one time or another. This could be from Old French, adopted up to a millennium ago, or this could come more recently from Modern French. It might not be surprising to learn that many of the words used in Old French are not the same as those used today, but even newer words that are used in English are sometimes not used in French. The word 'double-entendre', for example, comes from a French word 'entendre' meaning 'listen', now taken to mean 'understand', though in fact this is a corruption of the French phrase 'à double entente', a word you might recognize from the Triple Entente or Entente Cordiale: alliances during WWI. The problem here is that if one were to say 'double entendre' to a speaker of Modern French (assuming that person is not also relying on English) it would not mean anything, and effectively go from denoting a double-meaning to zero-meaning. Instead, a French speaker might say 'double sens'.