Cyrillic

Today is Saint Cyril's day. Because Saint Cyril was the greatest missionary to the Slavs, the Cyrillic alphabet is named after him. Cyril died 1143 years ago today.

It is also the day of Saint Methodius, Cyril's brother. So far as I can tell there are no other saints in the current Romish liturgical calendar for today, although there is a petition to have a certain chap reinstated.


For those of you who can bear the sound of my horrid, nasal voice.

Go, Litel Bok

It's out! The Etymologicon is in bookshops today. It is published (etymologically made public, and therefore related to pubs). I scampered up to the Waterstones on Islington Green and there it was on the table, lying alluringly next to The Gashlycrumb Tinies.

I feel like a proud father who has finally managed to clone himself in book form. At the end of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer says goodbye to his book:

Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedie...

And then he adds that:

And for there is so great diversity
In English and in writing of our tongue,
So pray I God that non miswrite thee,
Nor thee mis-metre for default of tongue;
And read where-so thou be, or else sung,
That thou be understood, God I beseech!

I rather like the idea of people singing The Etymologicon. In fact, I shall insist on it as a condition of sale. So, if you don't want to have to demonstrate a good voice and a mastery of the harp, you should run out and get a copy today.

By the way, for the Londoners among you, The Londonist website has a thing up today on me and the etymology of Tube stations. It can be found by clicking on this link.

Go, litel bok.

Doggerel and Dog Mess

I was once stomping about, feeling proud and tragic and misunderstood, when my stern and heroic shoe was cushioned by something soft and forgiving, donated to the pavement by the generosity of a dog's bottom. It is the nature of tragedy that Hamlet never treads on a turd, and in the nature of life that he would. As Auden put it:

They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life

In the end, our heroic autobiographies are all written in doggerel, which means little dog. Nobody is quite sure why. Perhaps doggerel is the sort of writing that would appeal to a puppy. But perhaps there is a better explanation deducible from the words first* recorded use in The Canterbury Tales. When it finally comes round to Chaucer's turn to entertain the pilgrims with a story, the narrator starts to tell the Tale of Sir Thopas. It's a truly terribly story about a knight and a not very frightening monster, and nobody wants to hear the end, for, as the landlord says:

Mine ears achen of thy drasty [shitty] speech.
Now swich a rhyme the devil I biteche!
This may well be rhyme doggerel," quod he.


"Why so?" quod I, "why wilt thou lette me
More of my tale than another man
Syn that it is the best tale I can?"


"By God," quod he, "for plainly at a word
Thy drasty rhyming is not worth a turd."

So I humbly submit, dear reader, that doggerel is the little bit of dog that is left behind on the pavement, and that rhyme doggerel was originally dog-turd rhyme.

*There are earlier records of doggerel as a name, but they don't appear to have anything to do with poetry.

Chaucer's Fowls

Valentine's Day was invented by Chaucer. It's his fault. Whether you are planning to spend this evening paying five times the normal price for a corner of a crowded restaurant, or whether you are looking forward to a night of solitary sobbing, blame Geoffrey and ornithology.

You see, it's around this time of year that birds start to mate. (I've just conducted a brief field trip and didn't see any feathered fornication, but there was a frisky looking pigeon flapping about in a suggestive way.) How does this connect to Chaucer? Because he wrote a poem about birds falling in love. It's called the Parliament of Fowls, and if you like you can read it here.

Essentially, Chaucer dreams that he goes to the garden of love and witnesses a bunch of birds choosing their spouses.

For this was on Saint Valentines day,
When every fowl cometh there to choose his mate,
Of every kind that men thinke may
And that so huge a noise 'gan they make
That earth, and air, and tree, and every lake
So full was that unethe [hardly] was there space
For me to stand, so full was all the place.

And that is the first ever reference to Valentine's Day being the day on which creatures choose their sweethearts. Slowly the idea was transferred from birds to people, and that's the cause of all the trouble.

The Parliament of Fowls opens with some great lines on Love:

The life so short, the craft so long to learn,
Th'assay so hard, so sharp the conquering,
The dreadful joy alway that slit so yerne [slides away]
All this mean I by Love, that my feeling
Astonyeth [is astonished] with his wonderful working
So sore, iwis, that when I on him think
Nat wot I well wher [I don't know whether] I float or sink.

And then these bookish and lonely lines:

For all be that I know not Love in deed,
Nor wot how that he quitteth [pays] folk their hire,
Yet happeth me full oft in books read
Of his miracles and his cruel ire.


So unruffle your feathers, get your hackles up and find yourself a bird.

Expressly Expressing Express Espressos

If you have ever expressed yourself on an express train, you may have wondered about the origin of the expression and why it should expressly mean that. You may then have settled down with an espresso and forgotten all about it.

Once upon a terribly long time ago there was a Latin word exprimere, which meant to press out, and the past participle of which was expressus. When you press your seal* into soft wax you produce an image, and, so far as anybody can tell, that's why the Latin word took on the meaning of describing or representing something.

Cows expressed milk, sores expressed pus and human beings were expressed by God. Very quickly people got the idea of expressing thoughts as words, as though the mouth were the udder of the mind. Thus Chaucer's:

Thy virtue and thy great humility
There may no tongue express

Also from this came the idea of something that was specifically, or expressly, designed for one purpose and for no other. If God expressed man, he did it rather well, or at least that's what Hamlet thought:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!

We still use this meaning when we say expressly. Thus today's Guardian:

In a work expressly intended for students to perform, Pountney has created a dramatic structure that interlocks three stories of 20th-century student political action...

So how do you send a letter? Do you entrust your epistle to the general mail, or do you employ somebody expressly to deliver it? Do you find a chap, give him one letter and express instructions? If so, then you have sent the letter express.

The same sort of thing happened to trains. Some trains dawdle. They may say on the front that they are going to Euston, but once aboard you discover that they are in no great hurry to get there and that you will probably be pausing at Moreton-St-Davids for an hour or so while they load up the baggage car with sheep. What you need is a train that is meant expressly and exclusively for Euston, a train that does not stop anywhere else.

These days express trains aren't very express and will probably terminate at Preston on a whim, but that's not how it once was, dear reader.

And so a word that meant press out came to mean describe and intentional and specific and fast and non-stop.

And espressos? Though an espresso should be drunk quickly and is probably expressive of something or other, the dwarf coffee owes its name to the original Latin. You see, the steam is pressed out through the coffee grains and into the bonsai cup.

Like a cow expressing milk

*By which I mean a coat of arms, not a marine mammal. I made that mistake once and the zookeeper got cross.

The Chaucer Stone

If you want to know what Jesus looked like you need only inspect a drainpipe in Coventry where his face miraculously appeared. I've never been utterly certain how, upon inspection of a piece of toast or a puffy cloud, people manage to identify a historical figure. The omissions of ancient portraiture mean that any burnt piece of toast could be a holy likeness for a Christian, or a blasphemous one for a Muslim.

Those, like me, who worship at the shrine of verbiage and prostrate themselves before the blessed poets will be more interested in the Chaucer Stone, which is kept in the British museum and depicts, geologically, the face of the blessed Geoffrey.

And there's a real portrait to which we can compare it. Chaucer hovers over English literature with agonising influence. Even Chaucer found it hard to live up to Chaucer. In the Man of Law's Prologue he says:

I can right now no thrifty tale seyn [say]

That Chaucer, though he can but lewedly

On metres and on rhyming craftily,

Hath said hem in swich [such] English as he can

Of olde tyme, as knoweth many a man;

And if he have noght said hem, leve [dear] brother,

In o book, he hath said hem in another.

For he hath told of loveris up and doun
Mo than Ovid made of mencioun
In his Epistles, that been full old.
What shold I tellen hem, syn [since] they been tolde?

Little Tommy Turdman and the Waste Land

I've just discovered that in the early Eighteenth Century the servant whose job it was to empty the chamber pots was called a Tom Turdman.

You'd think that the job was bad enough without your employers rubbing it in (as it were). But I'm so delighted with the name that I care not a whit, jot or iota for poor Tommy Turdman's feelings.

Incidentally, I am not alone in my infantile delight at the word turd. T.S. Eliot, in his notes on The Waste Land, needlessly annotated these lines thus:

But sound of water over rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees*

*This is the Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit thrush which I have heard in Quebec Province. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America) 'is is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats. ... Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.' Its 'water-dripping song' is justly celebrated.

The notes to The Waste Land were utterly unintentional. It was decided that the poem was too short to publish on its own, so T.S. Eliot composed them to fatten  up the volume, and to mention the word Turdus.

Or, as the host says in the Canterbury Tales,

...pleynly, at a word
Thy drasty rhyming is nat worth a toord.

A constipated hermit thrush

Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain

Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain was the mnemonic that I was taught as a child in order to remember the colours of the rainbow. Why anybody thought that I needed to remember the colours of the rainbow, I don't know. Nobody, in all my long and weary years, has ever asked me "Hey, Dogberry, what are the colours of the rainbow in the correct order?" But such was I taught, and as an aftershock to yesterday's post on synaesthesia here is a post on the colours of the rainbow.

Red: Red letter days are so called because in old church calenders feast days were written in red ink. In American banking ledgers of the early twentieth century debts were written in red ink and credits in black. An Italian debtor is said to be in the green. Either way one is in the soup.

Orange: Oranges were originally a fruit and didn't become a colour until 1542. For this reason in the Nun's Priest's Tale Chauntecleer the Cockerel describes his nightmare about a fox thus:

Me mette [dreamed] how that I romed up and doun
Withinne our yeerd, wheer as I saugh a beest
Was lyk an hound, and wolde han maad areest
Upon my body, and wolde han had me deed.
His colour was bitwixe yelow and reed
And tipped was his tayl and both his eeris

He then goes on to defy laxatives.

Yellow: Has always stood for cowardice, it was believed that a lack of blood made the liver yellow. It's odd that nobody seems to like to mention this colour. I can think of no yellow political party and even yellow hair is called blond/blonde (the only adjective in English that agrees with its noun) or golden. The yellow jersey of the Tour De France is the one exception that I can think of.

As Bob Dylan wrote in Tombstone Blues:

Well, John the Baptist after torturing a thief
Looks up at his hero the Commander-in-Chief
Saying, “Tell me great hero, but please make it brief
Is there a hole for me to get sick in?”

The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly
Saying, “Death to all those who would whimper and cry”
And dropping a barbell he points to the sky
Saying, “The sun’s not yellow it’s chicken”

Green: The sixth stanza of Anderw Marvell's The Garden runs thuslyly:

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness
The mind, that ocean where each kind,
Does straight its own resemblance find.
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.

The second couplet, by the way, is based on the idea of contemporary biology that each land animal had an equivalent in the sea. However, even at the time Thomas Browne (the Inky Fool's favourite essayist) was inclined to disbelief:

THAT all Animals of the Land, are in their kind in the Sea, although received as a principle, is a tenent very questionable, and will admit of restraint. For some in the Sea are not to be matcht by any enquiry at Land, and hold those shapes which terrestrious forms approach not; as may be observed in the Moon fish, or Orthragoriscus, the several sorts of Raia's, Torpedo's, Oysters, and many more, and some there are in the Land which were never maintained to be in the Sea, as Panthers, Hyæna's, Camels, Sheep, Molls, and others, which carry no name in Ichthyology,

Blue: Blue murder is not a rather saucy form of homicide: it is a translation of the French exclamation mort bleu, which is a corruption of mort dieu, meaning death of God. Blue murders are likely to be carried out by blue-rinse blue stockings.

Indigo: is one beyond blue, it is therefore a very sad colour. Blues musicians have nothing on their indigo colleagues:

For there's nobody who cares about me
I'm just a poor fool that's bluer than blue can be

Is therefore a lyric from Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo*.

Violet:

"Roses are red
Violets are blue":
That's what the song said,
But it cannot be true.
"I have seen roses
Damasked red and white"
Shakespeare discloses,
And he's always right.
And a blind man could see
That violets are violet
Linguistically:
Such truths are inviolate.

And after that we drift into the invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is mostly white noise.

Violet in colour, I think you'll agree.

*Duke Ellington wrote neither the melody, the title nor the lyric; but the matter is so vexed that I shan't go into it here.

April is Icumen In

I am feeling idle and working frantically at tomorrow's post: so a mere medley on April as we are now entering the months of women's names: April, May, June, Julia and Augusta.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
   - 1984 by George Orwell

'But tell me, now, which season do you like best, Kay?'
'I like them all,' he said. 'I suppose I like April best, on the whole.'
    - The Box of Delights by John Masefield

April is in my mistress' face,

And July in her eyes hath place;
Within her bosom is September,
But in her heart a cold December.
  - Thomas Morley

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!
   - Home Thoughts From Abroad by Robert Browning

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote [sweet showers]
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote [drought]
And bathed every veyne in swich licour, [liquid]
Of which vertu engendred is the flower;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sun
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne, [Sun's in Aries]
And smale foweles maken melodye, [fowls: birds]
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
   - Canterbury Tales by Chaucer

It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens
Hearing the frogs exhaling from the pond,
Watching traffic of magnificent cloud
Moving without anxiety on open sky–
Season when lovers and writers find
An altering speech for altering things,
   - Auden It was Easter...

April brings the sweet spring showers:
On and on for hours and hours.
    - A Song of the Weather by Flanders and Swann
 
There! And I didn't mention The Waste Land once.
 

The Inky Fool beset by feral youths

Imparadise

Imparadise is a lovely verb meaning "to place in paradise".

Incidentally, paradise originally meant a walled garden, like the one in which Emily is seen in The Knight's Tale. Walled gardens were dreadfully important to the medieval poets, partially because of The Romance of Rose and partially because such sequestered fertility was a symbol of the Virgin Mary's womb, which is why she is often pictured like this:

Paparazzi snap of Mary in her hortus conclusus

Two paradises 'twere in one
To live in paradise alone.
Marvell

A tip of the blogger's bowler to Bradshaw of the Future

Paralipsis and Occultatio

Paralipsis is the most common rhetorical device in domestic arguments. Last night I was walking a dog (not mine) when I passed a young lady haranguing her beau. She was pointing her finger into his face at close range, as though it were a gun, or perhaps as though she were conducting a tiny orchestra that was hidden in his mouth. This digital aggression was accompanied by vocals that went:

'I'm not going to bring up how you were late. Late. By half a [inaudible] hour. Or the time in the bath. I'm not bringing that up. Okay? Because... I don't need to bring all that [inaudible] up because...'

But I was wending my way down the road and didn't hear her reason.

The practice of bringing up the fact that you're not bringing something up is called paralipsis, and that's what this girl was doing. She was listing her boyfriend/husband's faults whilst pointing out how kind it was of her not to list them. She was having her cake and gobbling it up.

There's a bit in Chaucer's Knight's Tale where he spends forty-five lines describing exactly what it is about a funeral that he won't describe. This goes into some detail. He concludes:

I wol nat tellen eek how that they goon

Hoom til Atthenes, whan the pley is doon;

But shortly to the point thanne wol I wende

And maken of my longe tale an ende.

Chaucer's exercise in not-mentioning-what-he's-mentioning can seem even to a Chaucer-lover (like me) a rather pointless and prolix rhetorical exercise. But if you're a nosy, prurient eavesdropper (like me) you realise that that's how people really talk. Paralipsis is an essential part of our language, embalmed in the phrases "not to mention" or "I won't bore you with..."

Now, as somebody is bound to point this out there is a very, very technical distinction between paralipsis and occultatio. Occultatio is the literary, indifferent version of paralipsis where you're not trying to put anyone down, you're just doing it. So Chaucer was using occulatio. However, the two are so closely related that they are oftentimes confused or substitued for each other like the Neville twins.

"Not to mention" can be used for either paralipsis or occultatio. I won't bore you with examples, but needless to say the girl last night was definitely using paralipsis, not to mention her finger.

Eavesdropping made simple

Gormless, Feckless, Reckless and Ruthless

I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
   - The Code of the Woosters, P.G. Wodehouse

The resurrection of palimpsest words is a simple, practically failsafe, form of humour. There are thousands of them loitering in the language like cripples from an old war: neither kempt, couth nor combobulated. Languages are untidy and untidiable. They may be spick but they are seldom if ever span.

So here are four of them: all less-words.

Gorm (spelled all sorts of ways) was a Scandinavian word meaning sense or understanding. As Orm the monk put it:

& 3unnc birrþ nimenn mikell gom/To þæwenn 3unnkerr chilldre

A sentiment with which we can all, I'm sure, agree. Gorm seems to have remained a popular word in the North of England, but was rarely written down as Northeners couldn't write because their fingers were numb from the perpetual cold.

However, in the nineteenth century literacy spread beyond the Watford Gap and Emily Bronte wrote a book called Wuthering Heights, in which is the line:

Did I ever look so stupid: so gormless as Joseph calls it?

Joseph is a servant who speaks with a strong Yorkshire accent and the word gormless is clearly being brought in as an example of one of his dialect terms. I don't know if it is this one novel that was responsible but from the mid-nineteenth century onward gormless seems to have spread and spread whilst its lessless original stayed at home on the moors and slowly pined away and perished.

Once upon a time there was the word effect. It was a happy, useful, innocent word until it went to Scotland. The Scots are like northeners except more so. Once north of Hadrian's Best Idea, the word effect was cruelly robbed of its extremities and became feck. Those indolent, vigourless Scotsmen who had no effect on things were therefore feckless. This time it was not Bronte but Thomas Carlyle, a Scot, who brought the word into common usage. He used it to describe his wife and the Irish, of whom the less said the better.

It's quite hard to see exactly how Carlyle used the word. This from a letter of 1842:

Poor Allan's dust was laid in Kensal Green,—far enough from his native Kirkmahoe. M'Diarmid has a well-meant but very feckless Article upon him this week.

The article in question was in the Dumfries Courier and though I have a complete bound set of every Dumfries Courier ever published in my pantry, I can't be bothered to look it up and find out whether the article was effectless or simply lazy. In another Carlyle wrote that the summer had made his wife feckless and he even described how living with her in London had turned the couple into "a feckless pair of bodies," "a pair of miserable creatures".  Anyway, Carlyle used feckless but not, that I've ever been able to find, feck and so the one word lived while the other drowned in some lonely loch.

Reckless is far simpler and there's more poetry in it, which is the important thing. Reck used to mean care (although it is etymologically far from reckon). As Chaucer put it.

I recke nought what wrong that thou me profre,
For I can suffre it as a philosóphre.

Shakespeare uses the word too, yet it has an archaic feel. In Venus and Adonis he wrote:
 
I reck not though I end my life to-day
What recketh he his rider's angry stir,
His flattering 'Holla,' or his 'Stand, I say'?
What cares he now for curb or pricking spur?
For rich caparisons or trapping gay?
He sees his love, and nothing else he sees,
For nothing else with his proud sight agrees.

Shakespeare uses recketh, but only in apposition to cares. The implication, I suspect, is that the word was already archaic and needed the explanatory synonym. In Hamlet Ophelia chides her brother thus:

Do not as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads
And recks not his own rede.
 
Reck is here not explained (except by context) but coupled with another archaic word in old-fashioned alliteration. Meanwhile, the reckless two lines before stands on its own among its modern peers. Shakespeare used reckless six times, as much as all the other recks, reckeths and reckeds put together. Reck must already have been fading, reckless rushing headlong to the future.
 
The last word for this post (which could have gone on forever and may already have felt as though it has) is ruthless. It's nice and clear and simple. Ruth meant regret and related to rue as truth relates to true. As Milton put it in Lycidas:
 
Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth
 
I don't know why this blog keeps mentioning Lycidas. Anyone would think I was obsessed, which I'm not. I can go for hours without even reading it. I'm obsessed with Tennyson and whisky, but never seem to mention either.

This post could have gone on forever, but I've become listless.
 
 

Brahms, feeling Lisztless

Halcyon Days

Today (or possibly yesterday, but I forgot) is the first of the Halcyon Days which will last until just before the end of December. The Halcyon Days are the fortnight of supposedly calm weather in midwinter during which the halcyon, or kingfisher, lays her eggs.

The eminent biologist/meteorologist Ovid explains that Ceyx and Alcyone were lovers. Ceyx had to go to sea for some reason and every day Alcyone (the girl) would go down to the shore to look for his returning vessel. She continued this vigil until she was informed by the utterly reliable medium of a dream that the ship had sunk and Ceyx had drowned. At this news, as Chaucer so movingly put it,

"Allas!" quod she for sorwe
And deyede within the thridde morwe.

[quod=said sorwe=sorrow deyede=died thridde=third morwe=day]

Anyway, everybody was terribly upset including the gods who decided on their tried and tested fall-back plan of turning both the lovers into birds (avification was only just behind stellafication in the Attic list of divine mercies).

The gods then went further and decided to make the sea calm and the weather bright for one fortnight a year starting on the 14th/15th of December so that the Alcyon could explore and develop her newfound egg-laying capabilities, for which I'm sure the young lady was profoundly grateful.

Anyway, the usual modern sense of the halcyon days as being the happy days before all the trouble started is a figurative extension of this precise ornithometeorlogical usage.

Note the wings forming

Chaucer and Poets' Corner

According to today's Times there's a campaign to put up a memorial to Ted Hughes in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Seamus Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, and Lord Bragg of Wigton, the author and broadcaster, are among those who have written to the Dean of Westminster calling for Hughes to be included. [I love the the perennial "calling" of the news]

Simply because your life wouldn't be worth living if you didn't know: Poet's Corner should really be called the Lying-Around-With-Chaucer Corner.

Geoffrey, you see, took a 53-year lease on a house beside Westminster Abbey on Christmas Eve 1399. It was on the site of what's now the Henry VII Chapel. It was a place to live, nothing more. Less than a year later he had died (of natural causes despite what crazed ex-Pythons may imagine).

So he was buried in Westminster Abbey simply because it was his parish church: nothing to do with his being a poet. Indeed, if any excuse were needed, his being an MP and civil servant may have helped. Edmund Spenser was buried nearby in 1599 and so the poet idea took hold.

As we're on the subject of Chaucer and death, here is Geoffrey rhyming craftily about a man being led to his execution:

Have ye nat seyn sometyme a pale face,
Among a prees, of hym that hath be lad
Toward his deeth, wher as hym gat no grace,
And swich a colour in his face hath had
Men myghte knowe his face that was bistad
Amonges alle the faces in that route?

[prees=crowd, lad=led, swich=such, bistad=in trouble]

That, to putte othir men in rémembraunce

Of his persone, I have heere his lyknesse

P.S. In case you were wondering, The Riverside Chaucer is, along with the Longman Paradise Lost, the best edition of any work in English.

Take Out The TCB

R, E, S, P, E, C, T:
Find out what it means to me.
R, E, S, P, E, C, T.
Take out the TCB.
Sock it to me. Sock it to me. Sock it to me. Sock it to me. Sock it to me.

So sang Miss Aretha Franklin in a section that she added to Otis Redding's song Respect. For years I misheard the words and believed that she was singing:

R, E, S, P, E, C, T.
Take out the T, C, P.

So I would remove the letters T, C and P from RESPECT and be left with rese, which means tremble as anybody familiar with Chaucer's description of the temple of Mars in The Knight's Tale knows:

And therout came a rage and suche a veze,
That it made al the gate for to rese.

This seemed appropriate as Miss Franklin's supposed paramour, who has previously been enjoined merely to "respect" her, is now at the song's climax being asked to go further and to "rese" or tremble before her: a megalomaniac yearning to which the maenads respond with the incantation, "sock it to me sock it to me sock it to me" etc..

The only other explanation was that Miss Franklin was asking for TCP the well known brand of antiseptic, whose name is a shortening of trichlorophenylmethyliodosalicyl. Perhaps, I thought, she yearns to heal the metaphorical (or even literal) wounds inflicted upon her by her respectless beau by cleaning them with this literal and emotional disinfectant.

There was even the intriguing interpretation that Miss Franklin was demonstrating that respect could be cabalistically deconstructed into its two orthographical components of trembling and antiseptic.

Then in one damascene moment I heard that it was not P but B. Take out the TCB. TCB is an initialism for Taking Care of Business. This phrase, nearly unknown on our shores, was used as a catch-all excuse by the tardy American male of the mid twentieth century. As in:

Female: Why were you out until three in the morning?
Male: TCB, baby, TCB.

Miss Franklin is asking, therefore, that her lover cease to use this nebulous excuse; and therefore, by implication, she is entreating him to give up all those sins and divagations that would make such an excuse necessary.

Just thought you ought to know.

More discussion of such topics can be found in this video.