Of all the writers given to speculating about what it means to be a Minnesotan, Kevin Kling is my favorite because his work has the smudge of the real and the weirdness of the human. He comes off as one of the nicest guys you'd ever want to meet*–and people who know him confirm this–yet he empathizes with Richard the Third, Shakespeare's most stunted villian.
When he is speaking to an Egyptian cab driver in Minneapolis who tells him that Egyptian is like music, Kling unwisely points out that our dialect is like music, too.
And while he could have crafted a folksy aphorism for the same purpose, Kling's one-sentence primer on how to speak white rural Minnesotan is a bit of microjournalism, something he overheard at an actual convenience store, and an illustration of our melodic open os:
"I ain't gonna pay no dollar for no corn muffin that's half dough."
Say that five times a day for a while and you'll just sorta become a Minnesotan.
*A phrase which raises the possibility of guys so nice you wouldn't want to meet them, evidently because they would make you feel bad.
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