courage is a hard thing to figure. you can have courage based on a dumb idea or mistake, but you're not supposed to question adults, or your coach or your teacher, because they make the rules. maybe they know best, but maybe they don't. it all depends on who you are, where you come from. didn't at least one of the six hundred guys think about giving up and joining with the other side? i mean, valley of death, that's pretty salty stuff. that's why courage it's tricky. should you always do what others tell you to do? sometimes you might not even know why you're doing something. i mean any fool can have courage. but honor, that's the real reason, you either do something or you don't. it's who you are and maybe who you want to be. if you die trying for something important then you have both honor and courage and that's pretty good. i think that's what the writer was saying that you should hope for courage and try for honor. and maybe even pray that the people telling you what to do have some, too.

你可以犯傻般地孤勇到底，但是你得确保这件事情并不是真的傻，至于别人认为怎样才是最明智的，完全不重要。你是你，你有你的方式，这才是一切的根本。

    这是弱点刚开始那会的一个片段截图。如果你喜欢看美剧，你会经常看到当一个人希望稳定一下情绪，过几秒再做下一个动作的时候，会习惯地在1、2、3后加上一个词“mississippi”，其实这在许多美国人的生活中已经形成了一个约定俗成的习惯。那么为什么美国人数秒时习惯说one mississippi呢？其实这是一个连美国人自己也说不清楚的问题。

    我们很难能找到它的起源，不过大部分人认为这是美国人在童年时候的就已经学到的一种数秒的方法，因为读mississippi这个单词刚好大约需要一秒钟时间，one mississippi, two mississippi, three mississippi...雨天的时候孩子们看到闪电，父母和老师便让他们用这种方法开始数秒，等雷声响起的时候孩子们就可以根据数到的秒数来计算闪电发生的地方距离自己有多远了（the speed of sound is about 1/5 of a mile per second），这大概是美国基础教育中的一种很简便很实用的物理教学方法。

    为什么不用其他的单词而一定要用mississippi呢？很多人认为这是因为mississippi这个词是小孩学习拼写时最开始遇到的比较复杂的单词之一，“it's one of the first "hard" words most of us learn to spell.”于是人们用的多了，便成为一个沿用下来的说法。

    当然，有时候你还可以听到其他类似的说法，例如，one steam boat, two steam boat...我们还可以把加的词放在数字前面，如 mississippi one, mississippi two...或 one thousand-one, one thousand-two...等等。

    one mississippi是美国人的数秒方法，如果你来到其他英语国家，可能听到的就不再会是mississippi（密西西比）了，比如英国人小时候首先学到的词不可能是mississippi。关于这一点我们还有一个笑话，大家不妨看看能不能理解：

    a canadian was observing teaching methods in schools in several african countries.

in one, she found the children doing a science lesson, timing the swing of a pendulum（钟摆）. the lesson had evidently been prepared in the us as the children were counting "mississippi one, mississippi two, mississippi three ..."

    after the lesson the canadian gave a talk and mentioned that if children in her country were doing this experiment, they would probably use a canadian word like "saskatchewan"（加拿大的萨斯喀彻温省，注意它的最后一个音节） to do the timing.

    the next day, the canadian happened to drop in on the class and found them still timing the pendulum's swing, but today they were counting "saskatche one, saskatche two ..." 

    哈哈，不知道大家有没有看明白这个笑话。其实吧，要是能举个咱们日常生活中的例子可能更好理解，可是我现在大脑细胞完全处于休眠状态，大家要是有啥好例子就说出来分享一下吧~~嘿嘿