The Little Soda Twins

I don't recall exactly how much the Minnesota Twins pay Joe Mauer to play baseball. I think it is aobut $20 million a year. Joe is our favorite son: born, bred, and endowed right here in the Twin Cities.

Our Mauer also sings. In a commercial. As a singer, Joe is easily worth seventeen or sixteen dollars a gig. He can't sing. If hearing musical pitch were anything like seeing a slider, he would be hitting .013, or .012, all singles to the off-field.

His diction is pretty good, or as Bert Blyleven might say, "pretty well". Like everyone else in the jingle, he can be heard saying, ". . . in Minne-soda".

Soda! It is an old Indian name: "Minne-soda". It means, "small can of soda". In some peculiar places, people don't call it "soda". "Minne-pop", they say. "Gimme some fries and a Minne-pop!", they say. Nobody had to pay those people $20 million to say that. It is just the way they talk.

We say, "Minne-soda", here in the land of ten or fifteen thousand lakes. We say, "lakes". In a lot of places, people would call about half of them ponds or bogs.

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