"Take Out T-C-P"?!

Jimi Hendrix, after hearing so many people sing "Scuse me while I kiss this guy" in "Purple Haze," gave a tongue-in-cheek nod to "that guy" at one of his later concerts. I don't think they kissed, though. There's even a whole website spawned from Hendrix's infamous lyric, cataloguing all of our misheard mondegreens.+

+Mondegreen: a malapropism for song lyrics. Termed in 1954 by Sylvia Wright and her misinterpretation of the final line of Scottish song "The Bonny Earl of Murray." Lady Mondegreen was, in fact, "laid him on the green." Flash to 2008, when Mirriam-Webster permitted mondegreen entrance to its dictionary.

Recognizing and correcting a mondegreen, as well as insisting upon your own foolish lyric and how it sounds better, belongs to the upper-middle-class, iPod-surfing, road-trip experience. There's nothing that bonds people like shared misunderstandings. "Blinded by the light," we sing, but then what comes next? Our vocal cords say, "Wrapped up like a douche," but that doesn't make sense (and isn't pleasant if you try to puzzle it out). Bruce Springsteen originally wrote "Cut loose like a deuce," but Michael Mann had to change it to "Revved up like a deuce" and befuddle our eardrums on each listen.

We've all jammed to "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the car, a la Wayne's World. "Scaramouche, scaramouche" bewildered us; but we stayed in the game, through all the "Bismillah"s and "Mama mia"s... until the fateful line:

Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me.

Yes, Beelzebub, the prince of demons, the Lord of the Flies. On the tip of your tongue? My parents thought it was "the albatross" (those dangerous wings). KissThisGuy.com cites "the algebra."

It gets bad when listeners can't figure out the title. Some hear in Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising" the banal "There's a bathroom on the right." (Real lyric: "There's a bad moon on the rise," just like the title promises.)



But there's one mondegreen so strident, so irascible, so nebulous that it dwarfs all other mondegreens before and after. Ellen DeGeneres does a bit about not even bothering to learn the words (at 3:15 in the link).

Yep, we can spell R-E-S-P-E-C-T. We know what it means to me. But... wait... we're supposed to "Take out T-C-P"? Then we're left with R-E-S-E. Close to Reese, the maker of delicious Pieces. "Rese," it turns out, is a verb meaning "to shake; to quake; to tremble." How we gonna get any respect by shaking and trembling?

American culture lesson of the day: "TCB" was a common African-American expression in the 1960s for Taking Care of Business. Second, Aretha covered Otis Redding's song and added the R-E-S-P-E-C-T bridge. Music publishers couldn't tell, audiences couldn't tell, and sooner or later, we were all chucking T-C-P to the curb like the proto-fems we were/are. Comments on YouTube think TCP stands for "The Colored People," or that it's a pain-soothing drug. The real (allegedly) lyrics:

R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Find out what it means to me
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Take care, TCB

If you get off, jump back in on "Sock it to me, sock it to me."