Missy Elliott is no stranger to having her songs over-played in nightclubs and massacred on road trips by people that weren’t born with the gift of singing.
Work It, her cult-classic from 2002, hasn’t fallen far from our radar despite the fact there are at least four lines of the song everyone bar Missy Elliott fanatics can sing along to.
You know the ones:
Is it worth it? Let me work it
I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it
Tksjgfg qwjrguf jhargu
Tkawjdghuyfg jawghuj hsg
Except they obviously don’t go like that, because those are absolutely 100 per cent not words.
Turns out, though, thanks to BuzzFeed, Missy Elliott was actually trolling us the whole time, and those lines weren’t really words after all.
This is how it actually goes:
Is it worth it? Let me work it
I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it
Ti esrever dna ti pilf, nwod gniht ym tup
Ti esrever dna ti pilf, nwod gniht ym tup
If you got a big [elephant trumpet], let me search you
And find out how hard I gotta work you
Ti esrever dna ti pilf, nwod gniht ym tup
Ti esrever dna ti pilf, nwod gniht ym tup
But they aren’t just mindless jibberish either. If you look a little closer, Elliott literally puts her thing down, flips it and reverses it. As in, the words are backwards. Actually backwards.
I’ll just leave you to let that sink in, and let you know that life will never be the same ever again.
Top Comments
I figured this out the first time I heard the song. She literally tells you what she's going to do in the previous line. What else would the gibberish be?
It's hardly a big secret. It was on the song's wikipedia page.
I thought that was obvious?