A Deuced Difficult Challenge

Some perfectly normal words seem odd if you think about them for too long. The theme for Mono Monday today is 'deuce'. Not a word I've ever used except in the far-off days when I attempted to play a bit of tennis.

The next thing that popped into my head was the voice of characters in historical novels - usually male - exclaiming 'What the deuce? ... or 'Deuce take him!!', from which I inferred that it meant the devil.

I also had a vague idea that dice could be involve.

But when I looked it up this morning, I discovered that it can simply mean 'two'.

So here are the two cats. Perhaps Douglas is saying to Percy 'What the deuce is this stuff?? Why is there never a nice piece of fish in our bowls?'