Fraters Libertas

They Don't Like It Here

It's been a tough week for Minnesota among the imported paid opinion commentariat. First the Bard of Tangletown (by way of Fargo), the great James Lileks, threatens to leave us because our weather sucks. (With the local forecast for the Memorial Day weekend I fear he may have already booked passage to Tucson.)

Now City Pages blogger Michael Tortorello is ripping us because we talk funny. I see that he is not one of us either. His tone and the olive oil seeping from his last name implies he's from out East somewhere. (And I don't mean the East Side, although he might fit right in at Yarusso's.)

Tortorello has managed to tolerate living among us for 14 years, but that's not nearly enough time to get whichever spaghetti bending hell hole he hails from out of his system, as this decidedly un-Minnesotan review of how we sound demonstrates:

The accent ... it is either charmless or monstrous. The reason no one in Minnesota has ever eaten a good bagel is because the word itself does not exist. (I have no idea how to format a schwa with this blog software, but I can say definitively that "beggl" is not acceptable.) I suspect the reason Minnesotans, alone among Americans, picked Mondale over Reagan owes to the fact they couldn't pronounce the Gipper's name. (It's more like "Raygun" than "reggn" or "raggn"--where the "a" sound rhymes with "rat." This pronunciation phenomenon is a variant on what linguists term the "northern shift.")

Not sure who he's been talking to about Ronnie Raygun (around the watercooler the CP, I'm just happy to hear he's referred to by something other than "that senile, warmongering Bonzo bedding B-actor!"). But in my semantic circles, you're about as likely to here "Reeg-in" as "Raggn" in reference to the great man. Luckily we now have a President who's name we can all pronounce correctly together: BUSH. You see, that man really is a uniter, not a divider.

Tortorello does do us the service of pointing to University of Wisconsin professor Bert Vaux's survey of dialects, showing the regional distribution of various terms and pronunciations. It's fascinating stuff, finding out exactly where the tectonic plates are for the pronunciation of "mayonnaise" or how we refer to glancing at someone in a lustful way (Minnesotans tend to be "oglers" rather than "ooglers").

This does open my eyes to the remote possibility there may be other places just as good as, if not better than, here. For example this map shows the distribution of terms for drive through liquor stores.

There are places with drive through liquor stores? Up until now I thought that was reserved for heaven.