When I was a kid, grownups would sometimes advise me that to make my counting approximate the passage of seconds, it would help to say "one Mississippi, two Mississippi...." Other times, though, they would say that the right phrasing was "one one-thousand, two one-thousand ...." Can both be valid? Mississippi has four distinct beats. "One-thousands" only has three. Wouldn't the latter system yield shorter seconds than the former? A little experimentation since has found that I do tend to pronounce the four syllables of "Mississippi" roughly as rapidly that the three of "one thousand". Those esses, eh? One tends to slide right through them. One the other hand, after the word "one" I reach a full stop then press forward with the "the" sounds. I think we may say roughly that the space in between the two words acts as a beat, so both expressions are four beats. One childhood quandary at last resolved at 67...