That’s right. In fact, a law which passed in Mississippi is so restrictive, it could close the one remaining abortion clinic they have in the entire state, meaning a Mississippi woman, right now, could be saying to herself, “I need to go someplace more progressive like Alabama.”
Used in a common chronometric counting scheme, in which each iteration is sequentially numbered and supposed to be approximately one second in length.
1996 September, “Cheers & Jeers”, in Field and Stream, volume 101, page 12:
Any reader who uses the old “One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, etc.” method to estimate distance to a storm, and doesn't get any further than a count of five to eight had better be in a safe shelter.
1997, George Clark, The Small Bees’ Honey: Stories, Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, page 129:
I counted five Mississippis between each flash of lightning and the thunder crash that followed.
2008, Tim Winton, chapter 3, in Breath, Picador UK Paperback 2008 edition, page 30:
We had lungs like camel bladders by then; we sledged each other mercilessly, each daring the other to break the two-minute limit beneath the diving board. In the summer sea when it was flat-calm and there was nothing else to do but dive down and lie on the clean, ribbed bottom and hold our breaths to count Mississippis we got pretty close to our goal.
Although its current spelling may be derived from that of its much larger American cousin, it is most certainly a corruption of a different indigenous name, as the translation “great water” would not apply to a relatively minor tributary of the Ottawa, definitely the largest river in the area. Instead, the name may originate from Mazinaa[bikinigan]-ziibi, Algonquian for “[painted] image river”, referring to the pictographs found on Mazinaw Lake, though this is by no means proven.
“Mississippi”, in Slovníkový portál Jazykovedného ústavu Ľ. Štúra SAV [Dictionary portal of the Ľ. Štúr Institute of Linguistics, Slovak Academy of Science] (in Slovak), https://slovnik.juls.savba.sk, 2024
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