I visited Minneapolis once, many decades ago, the summer I graduated from college. It was hot and humid, new to me, having grown up in the desert. The “land of 10,000 lakes.” It was green and lovely. And the neighborhoods I observed were neat and tidy, the houses not large, but with basements, which you might as well have, since you had to dig that deep to keep plumbing from freezing. Quite similar to the neighborhood I grew up in.
The people were nice. It was my first encounter with the accent, which, as accents go, is a lot clearer to understand than many. The city was organized into “alphabets”; a set of streets would be named things going from A on through the alphabet, like, “Apple Tree Lane,” “Birch Tree Lane,” Cherry Tree Lane,” etc. Elsewhere the alphabet would be related to something else. It was a way of organizing neighborhoods.
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| example of Minneapolis alphabetical street names, found here |
I didn’t observe any of the chaos we’ve seen there in recent
years. You’d think just facing their extreme winter would be challenging enough
that no one would want any more trouble than that. But here we are.
It may be that the niceness was a contributing factor to the decline. Nice means pleasing and agreeable. It can also mean kind, but it’s not an exact synonym. There are multiple more meanings for both nice and kind in the Webster’s 1828 Dictionary, probably not helpful here today.
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perceive the difference, in others or even from the inside.
