Frazz by Jef Mallett for March 28, 2022

M i crooked letter crooked letter i crooked letter crooked letter i humpback humpback i!

The missing ‘s’ is on Frazz’s shirt :)

Frazz didn’t have to go all Ptero on Caulfield!

Unlike everyone else (so far), I learned it as

M – i – double ‘s’ – i – double ‘s’ – i – double ‘p’ – i

I seem to remember the kids on The Mickey Mouse club reciting a little jingle that broke it up as “MISS – ISS – IPPI”. I still use that today.

Frazz is 100% correct with his question in panel #3.

The s makes no difference in the Dactylic Meter.

It’s also weird to think it’s somehow significant, since lots of things have dactylic meter. Including “Alabama” and “California.” Or “Jeffrey Mallet,” for that matter.

Dactyls make sense. The spelling of Mississippi doesn’t.

♫ In 1814 we took a little trip

Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip’

We took a little bacon and we took a little beans

We fought the bloody British in the town of New Orleans ♫

Actually, Caulfield, what you’ve got is catalectic dactylic meter, anyway: The last foot is incomplete . .

In grade school we learned to sing

“M-I-S— S-I-S— S-I-P-P-I

That used to be so hard to spell, it used to make me cry.

But since I studied spelling, now it’s just like apple pie:

M-I-S— S-I-S— S-I-P-P-I."

Like a lot of education anymore getting the basics down pat are far less important than getting through the government mandated course requirements.

I thought a dactyl was a type of dinosaur.

Now someone explain to me why “Arkansas” ends with a “w” sound but “Kansas” doesn’t.

Well, English is generally spoken with a dactylic meter.

I could spell it backward better than I could forward, thanks to a jump rope rhyme: i-p-p / i-p-p / i-s-s-i-m!

Who besides me had to look up “dactyl”? That’s my new thing to learn today.

I know many, many things; what a dactyl is and how to spell…….that river’s name are not, alas, among them (but I’m going to dictionary.com right now to rectify half of that – and I’m guessing it’s not a flying dinosaur).

M i s S i s S i p p i. There was a song in an old Broadway revue.

Hemingway liked Maine. One dac. No tyl.

He saved his appreciation of polydactyly for his cats.

I learned it from this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpJLBhYdlwY

There is also a form of poetry called a “double dactyl.” Very specialized.

I heard she sipped a Minnesota.

Dactyl.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dactyl

What Caulfield left out is its etymological history. Uneven education here.

Mississippi

originally the name of the river, from the French rendering of an Algonquian name (French missionaries first penetrated the river valley in its upper reaches) meaning “big river;” compare Ojibwa mshi- “big,” ziibi “river.” Organized as a U.S. territory 1798; admitted as a state 1817. Related: Mississippian (by 1775; as a geological period, by 1891).

In 1666 French explorers somewhere in the western Great Lakes region encountered the Ojibwa name and rendered it as Messipi. The French then took the name with them as they went down the Big River to its delta, and it eventually superseded all the other names for the Big River used by local Indian tribes and by earlier Spanish explorers. Later, in 1798, Congress applied the Ojibwa name of the river to the territory of Mississippi, newly organized from lands inhabited by the Natchez, Choctaw, and Chickasaw.

It’s spelled M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i.