Mi, mi, mi
[first draft written June 9-10, 2025 in Bemidji, Minnesota, where the famous giant statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox stand next to beautiful Lake Bemidji*]
During my peregrinations in upper midwest USA, I noticed a proliferation of place names beginning with "mi-". Because there are 10,000 big and little glacial lakes up here, I suspected that "mi-" might be a prefix signifying "water"). I had come to Minneapolis to explore the headwaters of the Mississippi in northern Minnesota. That alone was enough of an emphatic prompt to set me off on a linguistic "mi-" quest.
My main intention on this trip is to follow the Mississippi from Lake Itasca, whence it emerges as a small stream about ten feet wide you can walk across on a line of stones in northern Minnesota, to where it debouches into the Gulf in the south. European-American settlers named the Mighty Mississippi after the Ojibwe word ᒥᓯ-ᓰᐱ misi-ziibi ("great river"). (source) Misi zipi is the French rendering of the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe or Algonquin) name for the river. (source)
So I had one strike against me on the first "mi".
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