Fionnuala’s Reviews > Life On The Mississippi > Status Update
Fionnuala
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The educated Southerner has no use for an r, except at the beginning of a word. He says ‘honah,’ and ‘dinnah,’ and ‘Gove’nuh,’ and ‘befo’ the waw,’ and so on. The words may lack charm to the eye, in print, but they have it to the ear. When did the r disappear from Southern speech, and how did it come to disappear? The custom of dropping it was not borrowed from the North, nor inherited from England [continued below]
— 18 hours, 39 min ago
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Fionnuala’s Previous Updates
Fionnuala
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WHERE the river in the Vicksburg region used to be corkscrewed, it is now comparatively straight—made so by cut-off; a former distance of seventy miles reduced to thirty-five. It is a change which threw Vicksburg’s neighbor Delta out into the country. Its whole river-frontage is now occupied by a vast sand-bar, thickly covered with young trees—a growth which will [become] a forest and completely hide the exiled town.
— Jan 13, 2026 06:41AM
Fionnuala
is 42% done
The loneliness of this solemn stupendous flood is impressive—and depressing. League after league it pours its chocolate tide along between its forest walls, its almost untenanted shores, with seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface and break the monotony of the watery solitude; and so the day goes the night comes and again the day—and still the same majestic unchanging sameness of serenity
— Jan 12, 2026 07:15AM
Fionnuala
is 37% done
Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812 At the end of thirty years it had grown to mighty proportions and in less than thirty more it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature. Of course it is not absolutely dead neither is a crippled octogenarian who could once jump twenty-two feet on level ground but as contrasted with what it was in its prime vigor Mississippi steamboating may be called dead
— Jan 10, 2026 10:31AM
Fionnuala
is 17% done
"The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.…[continued below]
— Jan 07, 2026 07:16AM
Fionnuala
is on page 15 of 409
When De Soto took his first glimpse of the Mississippi [1542], Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits was not yet a year old; Michael Angelo’s paint was not yet dry on the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not yet born, but would be before the year closed. Catherine de Medici was a child; Elizabeth of England was not yet in her teens…[continued below]
— Jan 06, 2026 08:50AM
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From your updates you can see the seeds of his adult style - eays of perceiving the world, awareness of speech patterns, a way of writing, maybe the characters too?
Yes, I think he must have been very observant, Jan-Maat. This book was written in the late 1870s, early 1880s when he was around fifty. He'd published Tom Sawer before it and Huck Finn came after it. This book has quite a few sketches of people and descriptions of incidents that I had come across fictionalised in Huck Finn.
I still remember my grandmother and to a lesser extent my mother saying "The wawtah is bawlin".
The Northern word ‘guess’—imported from England, where it used to be common, and now regarded by satirical Englishmen as a Yankee original—is but little used among Southerners. They say ‘reckon.’ They haven’t any ‘doesn’t’ in their language; they say ‘don’t’ instead. The unpolished often use ‘went’ for ‘gone.’ It is nearly as bad as the Northern ‘hadn’t ought.’ This reminds me that a remark of a very peculiar nature was made here in my neighborhood (in the North) a few days ago: ‘He hadn’t ought to have went.’ How is that? Isn’t that a good deal of a triumph? One knows the orders combined in this half-breed’s architecture without inquiring: one parent Northern, the other Southern. To-day I heard a schoolmistress ask, ‘Where is John gone?’ This form is so common—so nearly universal, in fact—that if she had used ‘whither’ instead of ‘where,’ I think it would have sounded like an affectation...