by Howard Mohr
—“You sure? It’s just right out there in the refrigerator.”
—“Well, if you’re going that way anyway. I don’t want you to make a special trip.”
—“Sugar?”
—“I don’t have to have sugar in my coffee…”
(Continue the above dialogue, adding other food items for practice.)
Special Note: In some non-food situations, Minnesota offers and refusals can be speeded up, as, for example, if you have lost your footing while removing snow from the roof of your house and are hanging by your feet from the rain gutter. Use your best judgment.
—“Want some help?”
—“No, that’s okay, I’ve got one foot worked loose.”
—“No problem. I’m right here.”
—“I got into this, I’ll get out of it.”
—“You look uncomfortable.”
—“Well, maybe you could hold my shoulders while I twist around.”
DESSERT NEGOTIATION
In this lesson you learn how to get all the dessert you want and deserve without appearing to want or desire it. That’s the way we do it: It’s okay to want something, we just don’t believe in showing it.
Phrases
Just a sliver.
About half that.
If you insist.
I’m trying to cut down.
Boogie Beat Bongo Bar?
Dialogue
(Two Minnesotans at the Sunday dinner dessert table. The hostess speaks first.) Here’s your motivation: When you line up for Minnesota dessert, you are only helping out the people who went to all the trouble to make that sea of sweets. If you don’t eat their desserts, it’s like a slap in the face. So even if you don’t want dessert, you should take some, or suffer the consequences. There is little difference between refusing dessert in order to get all you want and refusing dessert because you don’t want any. It comes to the same thing: a plateful of dessert.
HOSTESS: “How about some pie?”
GUEST: “I don’t need it, really, I’m sort of on a diet, but maybe just a sliver of the coconut creme.”
H: “How about the Dutch apple?”
G: “Well, I shouldn’t, but go ahead. Just a taste, though, and leave off the ice cream.”
H: “It’s homemade. Ralph cranked it up this morning.”
G: “Homemade ice cream. It’d be a crime to pass that up, wouldn’t it?”
H: “Silver Doodle Velvet sheet cake? I know Darlene brought it especially for you.”
G: “About half of what you gave Bill there. I’m trying to cut down.”
H: “There’s one Roll Me Over caramel nougat bar left. Why don’t you eat it? Go ahead. Then we can wash the pan.”
G: “It’s the least I can do, I guess. But then I’m gonna have to go lie down awhile.”
H: “Can you get it all on that plate?”
G: “No problem, I can stack up a couple of things and pile it in the middle there.”
SUNDAY DINNER
Some Minnesotans insist that Sunday dinner start at 12 noon sharp like the other six dinners of the week, but the standard is closer to 1 P.M., and can be as late as 1:30 if the sermon was long or if the oven did not go on automatically at 9:30 while you were deep in the examination of the first chapter of Romans in Sunday school.
If you are invited to Sunday dinner in Minnesota, don’t make plans for later in the day. After you eat you are obligated to move into the living room for conversation conducted through yawns. If there’s no football game on TV or you can’t hold your eyes open any longer or you are listing in the lounger more than forty-five degrees, you should go someplace where you can lose consciousness without drawing attention to yourself with unusual body noises.
—“After a meal like that a guy gets logy.”
—“Why don’t you take that back bedroom. There’s a comforter in the closet behind the card table.”
By 3:45, everybody will be strung around the house sawing logs. Don’t just lie down and read magazines or snoop in the drawers. Take off your shoes and go to sleep. You should have crease marks on your face from the bedspread when you come back out around 5:30 or 6.
Many Minnesotans feel more comfortable napping on top of their own beds. They excuse themselves and drive home—if it’s less than twenty miles—for a snooze. But when it’s time to haul out the leftovers at the meal site, they drive back and complete their Sunday obligation.
Out of bed, dress for church, Sunday dinner, nap, leftover supper, coffee and bars, and back in bed. It’s a complete Sunday package. Bailing out at any point would be a mistake without a legitimate reason or two.
—“Johnnie’s throwing up. We better head out.”
—“The headlights bit the dust on the way down. We gotta get home before dark. I think it’s a short.”
—“I’m not sure I shut the gate on the cattle yard.”
When you leave early, you will be given a bag of leftovers. Don’t refuse it.
Slow-Decay Snack Cakes:
A Disclaimer
I regret to say that SLOW-DECAY SNACK CAKES, our most generous and popular sponsor of How to Talk Minnesotan, can no longer be sold in stores—a crime really, after years of being voted the best food item for the winter survival kits that all Minnesotans keep in the trunks of their cars in case they are snowbound for a day or two. I also regret that I was compelled to place the following announcement from Borderline Drugs, LLC, as per its takeover of the Slow-Decay company.
In 2009 our lab experts at Borderline, ever vigilant to find expensive drugs, discovered by chance that aceto-porxo-myo-cina-razza-trin, the main ingredient in SLOW-DECAY SNACK CAKES, had incredible medicinal properties. Aceto-porxo-myo-cina-razza-trin is now sold only by prescription as RAZZATRIN™. It is a red capsule with black dots and a single yellow band that glows in the dark. Just ask your doctor if the “red pill with black dots and a single yellow band that glows in the dark” is right for you.
Do not continue to take RAZZATRIN if you experience mild blindness, increased blood pressure, or begin seeing things that others can’t see, such as snakes or UFOs. In some cases RAZZATRIN, instead of lowering your cholesterol, can increase it, but that is very rare, and we believe it is a fairly good bet this will not happen to you, but if it does, well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and we feel for you.
Dizziness, vertigo, hair loss, and constipation will very likely occur, along with a few rather personal side effects we would rather not mention.
Basic Conversations
CARRYING THE BALL
The basic Minnesota conversation consists of a statement or a question, followed by a reply.
—“Been havin’ pretty good luck with that Ford?”
—“You bet.”
Again:
—“Shall we have warmed-up hotdish for breakfast?”
—“It’s okay by me. You only go around once.”
Again:
—“Ol’ Daryl caught a walleye trolling with a Daredevil.”
—“That was dumb luck.”
A longer conversation would be multiples of this basic unit.
If you are called upon to start a conversation from a dead stop in Minnesota you should know that 35 percent of our conversations deal with the weather, 30 percent with cars, 15 percent with food, 10 percent with road and building construction, 9 percent with fishing, 1 percent with politics and religion, and 1 percent with the rest.
If you get into a tight spot, pick a subject, form it into a statement or question, and you’ll be right in the middle of a lively exchange. In the following conversation, four popular subjects have been skillfully intertwined.
—“I see they’re talkin’ about thunderstorms tomorrow.”
—“You bet. And I just washed my car.”
—“Good for fishin’ though, huh?”
—“You can say that again. But it’s gonna make it pretty muddy for the crew putting in that bypass out there on County 12.”
—“The thing is, do we really ne
ed it? We’ve been bypassed enough in this town.”
A Word About the Minnesota
Language System Phrase Cap
(Copyright 1986, patent pending)
You can increase your chances of having a nice visit in Minnesota by buying yourself a Minnesota Language Systems Phrase Cap to complement this guidebook. The Minnesota Phrase Cap features the name of a seed corn company, or a tractor, or a herbicide of your choice emblazoned above the bill. If you don’t specify in your order, you will receive either a green John Deere or a green Pioneer phrase cap. One size fits all, mostly, unless you have an unusually big head or a lot of hair, or your ears are too high. In that case, order the jumbo.
Inside the phrase cap you’ll find a hundred handy Minnesota phrases that will get you out of almost any conversational jam. Whenever a Minnesotan speaks to you, remove your cap, run your hand through your hair with your free hand, and then look inside the phrase cap for your reply. Looking inside a cap during a conversation is a perfectly natural act here.
Don’t let the pause disturb you as you search for your answer. Long silences are the heartbeat of a Minnesota conversation. A quick answer is a sure sign that you’re not from around here or you’re hiding something.
—“How’s life treatin’ you?”
—[Look in cap] “Not so bad. Can’t complain. It could be worse.”
Feed caps can be worn anywhere, anytime. [With some exceptions: See Feed elsewhere in this guide for more fashion information on feed caps.]
WEATHER CONVERSATIONS
If you can’t carry on a conversation about the weather in Minnesota, you might as well pack your bags and head back to where you came from. One day the clerk at the Red Owl said to this guy ahead of me in line, “What d’ya think of this weather?” And this guy’s face got red and he said
—“I don’t think anything. I don’t pay any attention. What weather? Are you kidding me? Do I know you?”
That was not a good reply for Minnesota.
Here are two Minnesotans getting wound up on the weather.
—“What d’ya think of this weather?”
—“Boy, it’s something.”
—“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
—“You got that right.”
In specific weather conditions the conversation becomes more detailed and animated. For example, in the fog.
—“It’s foggy, isn’t it?”
—“You talk about fog, this is it.”
—“I wonder what causes a fog like this?”
—“That’s an interesting question. They say it’s the cold ground meeting the warm moist air. But don’t quote me.”
—“It makes a guy wonder.”
Many weather conversations deal with predictions.
—“It’s gonna do something.”
—“Yeah, I don’t like the looks of those clouds.”
—“The birds are acting funny.”
—“And the air.”
—“Feels kinda thick or something.”
—“I’d say it could do anything.”
—“A guy wants to keep his eye on weather like this.”
A warm day with no wind and plenty of sun will be your toughest lesson. It’s not for beginners, but then it doesn’t come up all that much either.
—“Pretty nice day then, huh?”
—“It could be worse, but it won’t last. You get a day like this, it spells trouble. It’s too good.”
—“I know what you mean.”
—“It makes a guy nervous.”
—“Uneasy.”
—“You got that right.”
MINNESOTA WEATHER TALK: AN UPDATE
The kind of casual weather talk a guy would exchange with his neighbor if he met him on the street or at the post office has not changed much.
“So what do you think of this weather then?” works just fine as an opener, since it does not point to any radical opinion the speaker might have or trample on any weather beliefs held dear by the listener.
Your reply should be: “It’s something isn’t it? They say it’s gonna rain, but what do they know?” This reply sounds slightly opinionated, but what keeps it in the civil range of casual weather talk is the use of “they,” an unnamed entity whose role is to accept blame: “they” are traditionally wrong, whoever they are, so nobody gets upset.
Weather has always been a pretty safe topic for conversation in Minnesota, as topics go, certainly safer than “How about them Vikings?” This question would lead right into opinions on the draft, the quarterback, and the coach. That sort of talk can heat up fast.
Weather talk is still safe in 2012, but I would be remiss doing this update of the original How to Talk Minnesotan if I did not mention something new that has emerged in Minnesota weather. One should tread carefully in any discussions of this wind debate.
Straight-Line Winds versus Tornadoes
The following dialogue took place the morning after what the media said had been a destructive straight-line wind in southern Minnesota. Ned and Kyle, both farmers, met at the gas pumps in town, filling up their pickups with four-dollar-a-gallon diesel.
NED: “Say, Kyle, did you lose any trees in that straight-line wind we had yesterday?”
KYLE: “They say it got up to 120 miles per hour, and I believe it, but in my opinion it was not a straight line per se.* I lost a spruce and there’s no doubt it was twisted right out of the ground, and only a tornado could do that kind of damage.”
NED: “Yahbut, was there a funnel? You gotta have a funnel, Kyle.”
KYLE: “Well, it was not a visible twister but it felt like a twister is how I’d put it, what with things going every which way. I don’t know what else you’d call it.”
NED: “I don’t wanna get on your bad side this early in the morning, Kyle, but my machine shed was pushed downwind for almost a quarter mile as the crow flies, and not a twist anywhere on it, Kyle. It broke off all the support poles and left the sheet metal in a neat pile, worthless of course, except for recycling it to the junkyard. Steel prices are up, so it will be off to China with the shed is my guess.”
KYLE: “You are welcome to your opinion about the wind, Ned. But what about your tractor? Didn’t you have your biggest tractor in there?”
NED: “Well, it was sitting in the shed facing south, but now it’s out in the open facing north. I suppose you’re gonna tell me it was hit by a twister that whirled it one hundred eighty degrees?”
KYLE: “I wouldn’t try to tell you anything, but it seems pretty obvious.”
NED: “Whatever.”**
KYLE: “You can say that again.”
NED: “What do you say we go over to the Legion Hall and eat some of those sweet rolls that look like horse turds with frosting.”
KYLE: “Sounds good to me.”
As the result of the controversy over straight-line winds versus tornadoes, an obscure rural Minnesota poet has blossomed into celebrity with his instructive poem that definitively explains how to recognize the imminent arrival of a tornado and, more importantly, clearly allows folks to determine if it was indeed a tornado that went through, thereby ruling out straight-line winds.
How to Tell a Tornado
Listen for noises.
If you do not live
near railroad tracks,
the freight train you hear
is not the Northern Pacific
lost in the storm:
that is a tornado
doing imitations of itself.
One of its favorite sounds
is no sound.
After the high wind,
and before the freight train,
there is a pocket of nothing:
this is when you think
everything has stopped:
but do not be fooled.
Leave it all behind
except for a candle
and take to the cellar.
Afterwards
if straws are imbedded
&
nbsp; in trees without leaves,
and your house—except
for the unbroken bathroom mirror—
has vanished without a trace,
and you are naked
except for the right leg of your pants,
you can safely assume
that a tornado
has gone through your life
without touching it.
MINNESOTA TWEETS
Twitter is nothing new to Minnesotans. As you can see from the exchanges in Lesson 4, a basic conversational give-and-take can be conducted with way fewer characters than the 140 allowed in contemporary Tweets. In Minnesotan we go one step further, restricting basic conversational exchanges to thirty syllables.
Here’s a friendly exchange that was conducted with a total of eleven syllables:
—“Having pretty good luck with that Ford?”
—“You bet.”
Here’s a lively morning exchange completed successfully with twenty-two syllables:
—“Shall we have warmed-up hotdish for breakfast?”
—“It’s okay by me. You only go around once.”
Neither of these exchanges comes close to using 140 characters.
The topics of basic conversation in Minnesota have not changed much in twenty-five years.
What makes Minnesota Twitter so popular, even with some teenagers, is that it is conducted in everyday conversations, and no texting is required, no computer is required; in fact, all that is required is people having conversations as always, with pretty good give-and-takes, and way fewer than 140 characters. The only “characters” in Minnesota Twitter are the people themselves.
Newcomers to Minnesota need to know that talking weather is a primary skill. Practice the exchanges in “Weather Conversations” and you will soon accomplish three things: You will be on the road to fluency, you will be doing it in Minnesota Twitter, and you will be making friends besides.
Minnesotans can meet and tweet about the weather or the chances of the Vikings making it to the Super Bowl this year or any year, and the wonderful thing is that there is no possibility that their Tweets will be instantly shared and end up on millions of cell phones, computers, and iPads worldwide as breaking news. Nor will the Minnesota Tweets be sent automatically via the Internet to the Library of Congress to be stored forever.
