1211: Double Entendre Apr 3, 2018

Language is fraught with ambiguity. Philosophically this is because nothing can ever be fully communicated only verbally, but this is also because there are some words that can be different parts of speech, or words that are only one part of speech, but that have different definitions that can be included in the same contexts. Linguists call this syntactic ambiguity and lexical (or semantic) ambiguity respectively, but most lay folk call it double entendre. For instance, the question, "how did you find that music?" only features 'find' as a verb (though it can also be a noun) but asks two different questions: "how did you discover..." and "what are your feelings toward...". The linguistic pivot, so to speak, comes from lexicon, so for reference, this double entendre is said to be lexically ambiguous. This is also true in "I got to sleep late" which pivots on 'got' where it can mean "I could sleep in" or "it was late when I went to bed", and indeed has two possibly opposite meanings.
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