Words Rah Loves: Sippi

I was supposed to meet with The Three last week for a fun, deep exploration of setting (one of my subheads: Setting is a tyrant). Unfortunately, the day before the meeting the Poet Accountant, R and I had to head to Georgia for a funeral.

Funerals are full of setting, of course. The same family has run this particular funeral home in North Georgia since 1935, and our cousin-uncle accepted an outpouring of love and grief from what seemed like the entire town in the same rooms that held visitations years before for the Poet Accountant's grandmother and then his grandfather.

As we waited, we got reacquainted with all those cousins and second cousins and first cousins, and we tried to figure out which kids belonged to who (no one really knows, not even their parents), and we knew we would be back there again, someday, on another sad day. In a setting that hadn't changed at all and yet had.

Hang with me. I know that's heavy.

If you're going to be driven from your ancestral lands by
greedy landowners, this ain't a bad place to end up, yeah?

Funerals are settings, but they're also journeys. The road trip we took to get to that carpet town in Georgia took us over a mountain in Virginia and down I-81 South, a land of truckers thundering over gray and green hills the Scottish settlers thought looked like home. They named their towns Glasgow, Buchanan, Fincastle.

The Virginia part of that trip is one Rah makes every year, but past that we ventured into the foreign land of East Tennessee. If you leave I-81 and let the Great Smoky Mountains absorb you (watch out for the great sucking sound of tourist traps like Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg), you'll find yourself in one kind of heaven. But we were on the interstate—81 to 40 to 75—looking for clean, non-dodgy places to pee and eat (no truck stop Subways!), driving through the ugliest parts of Knoxville and Chattanooga.

And then we saw it: a sign for the Pellissippi State Community College.

I don't know if that gives you whiplash, but it did me. There's the Mississippi, of course, but it had never occurred to me that issippi might be some kind of a suffix. Luckily, the Poet Accountant dwells in a world of technology, so he was able to look it up on his evil smartphone while I scanned the horizon hopefully, desperately for a rest area.

She is a grand river river, ain't she?

Turns out that sippi means flowing water (maybe in Chippewa). You're probably not surprised to learn that the missi of Mississippi means large. So we have large flowing water. Which means that when we say the Mississippi River, we're really saying the large river river. Like when we call the Rio Grande the Rio Grande River. (Don't do that.)

(We could go down this path all day, but I'll try to restrain myself. Except I can't help mentioning that missi is related to michi, as in Michigan, and massa, as in Massachusetts. All done now. Really.)

I know you're dying to know if there are other sippi names in America. There's at least one: Poy Sippi in Wisconsin, named after the river that flows into Lake Poygan. Clearly, we need more.

Why does Rah love sippi? Well, besides the fact that it's so happy sounding (sippi! sippi!) and a delightful suffix discovery any day (I know; I'm a word geek), it was in the right place at the right time. Sometimes, I think writers worry about coincidence in their stories, like when Jane Eyre oh-so conveniently runs into her cousins. But coincidence is part of our lives and runs like ley lines through us, connecting what seems unconnected.

Like: Right after I saw the word Pellissippi for the first time and wondered about its origins, it started turning up everywhere because President Obama gave a speech at Pellissippi State Community College about his plan for free community college. You know how when you're dating some guy and suddenly you start to see his type of car all over town? It was like that. (Don't worry, Poet Accountant, that hasn't happened recently.)

Like: There is no river named Pellissippi anymore. These days we call it the Clinch River, which is where a bunch of the traditional musicians the Poet Accountant digs hang out (or did, when they were alive).

Like: We were going to a funeral when I saw the word Pellissippi, and it reminded me of the summer I spent with my cousin and how—because we were kids, I guess—we spent a crazy amount of time spelling Mississippi backward. (It really is fun; has a great rhythm. You should try it.) When we went to her funeral last summer (she was way too young), we crossed the Mississippi in a plane.

For Michelle and Gwen: ippi-ssi-ssi-m.