Cities and Language V: Minna

 

The Great Commissioner brought his foreign envoy Marco Polo to the seat of his empire’s greatest crown jewel. It sits at the nexus of all known types of transportation with rail lines and great highways and even airplanes landing majestically overhead. He takes them through a complex of inns and sites of great exhibitions of goods from lands that even Marco Polo has never heard of. It is ringed by portraits of an unsettling man with an uncanny head of hair impossible to exist in nature. 

The Great Commissioner takes Marco Polo to the seat of his empire, an ornate palace that shares a parking lot with a meat restaurant. It is across the highway from a minor league baseball stadium named for a hot dog where the ketchup mascot is regularly imprisoned and humiliated to reflect the tastes of the populace who abhor that condiment. 

“Tell me, Marco Polo,” the Commissioner says. “In all of your travels and all of the cities you have told me about, could you ever envision a city like this?”

“No,” Marco Polo said. 

Cities and Language V: Minna 

One arrives in the great city of Minna by road or perhaps even by the river through the gates and marvels at the enormous inflatable buildings and structures ingeniously designed to shield its residents from the harshest of the elements. The city is prosperous and tidy as residents bustle around conducting their business. It is only when a visitor attempts to speak to a Minnan that they will be utterly befuddled by how they communicate in this city.

The residents here speak in an almost impenetrable argot of slogans and acronyms. For example, a visitor simply attempting to greet a stranger and perhaps ask for directions will be told “Board the Train!” and when they ask for further clarification being told that “train” is an acronym that stands for “take risks and invalidate naysayers” before the person will chestbump the visitor. 

Even those practiced in Minna-speak can get tripped up. An experienced guide who spent a happy childhood in Minna and then left to pursue studies in other parts of the Commissioner’s vast kingdom before returning to serve as an interpreter for visiting dignitaries suffered a humiliating breakdown while trying to convey the meaning of G.A.R.G.A.N.T.U.A.N. somewhere around the second G. Even years later he could barely get through the story without holding back tears. “That is too many letters for a motivational acronym,” he said. “A child could see that.”

Despite the bizarre and oblique methods of speaking by telling each other to “readying hard means going hard” when “h.a.r.d.” is an acronym that in some tortured way ends up meaning trying hard, the people of Minna understand each other. There is a sort of labored poetry to their words. Unfortunately, this type of speech can lead to problems. I once witnessed a man greet a friend with “maximum drive means driving your max” and the two men disagreed with whether the V in drive stood for Velocity or Vicissitude. The two men came to blows on a sidewalk, pulling each other’s dri-fit quarter-zips over their heads exposing the shirt and tie they wear underneath and pummeling each other until passersby urged them to be K.I.N.D. (kindness is never donnybrooking).

The residents are kind and welcoming, largely because they are happy to sit down for hours and explain what their various sayings and acronyms mean. They are excited because it has taken their ancestors hundreds if not thousands of years to compile such a beguiling and twisting language that follows its own logic, even if it is kind of silly. But because they cannot speak without their comforting store of aphorisms and sayings, every conversation mushrooms into an even more impenetrable nest of references. I recommend staying away from Minna at all costs.