Twincy, Pig’s Eye, the ‘Ap and Tony Town.
“I hate the name ‘Twin Cities.’ It makes everything sound awkward. Can’t we get a cool nickname for once, like Philly, Cincy, Indy, PDX, NOLA or Chi-town? My vote: Twincy. Discuss.”
That’s Chuck Terhark, writing in Metro Magazine. With all due respect to Mr. Terhark, a very intelligent guy whose work I like very much, I simply cannot and will not get behind Twincy.
I have always preferred our airport code, the simple MSP. Or M-P-L-S, if absolutely forced into a corner.
Of course, the problem with nicknaming the so-called Twin Cities (and Chuck’s right, saying it has always been a total mouthful) is that a perfect nickname would have to cover both Minneapolis and our eternally whiny me-too conjoined twin to the east, St. Paul (AKA the Saintly City, Pig’s Eye, Hockeytown USA). “MSP” covers both. When I first moved here, I was impressed with the elegance of simply referring to Minneapolis-St. Paul as just the Cities. There’s an agreeably cornpone-cum-Tolkienian feeling to that.
As for Minneapolis itself, you can go with Mill City (Terhark’s least favorite), Cereal City (funny and noirish, but somehow lacking), the City of Lakes (bleh), and the execrable Mini-Apple (which is offensive to both chauvinistic New Yorkers and realistically-minded Minneapolitans).
For the heartless and sociopathic among us, there’s always Murderapolis. The 612 is another chesnut, but every city in America with an x-1-x area code refers to itself that way.
For awhile, I believe certain segments of the hip-hop community were referring to Minneapolis as the ‘Ap, which I kind of like. I can’t find citation on this, though, since Googling “ap minneapolis” just gets you a lot of information about the Associated Press.
When Minneapolis and St. Paul considered a merger in the 1890s, a few new names were kicked around, all of them completely terrible: Paulopolis, Twincit, Minneapaul and Federal City (which we would today, theoretically, call Fed City, or The Fed).
Minneapolis was not itself even so named. In 1872, Minneapolis absorbed the city of St. Anthony (which, if it were still a city today, would basically be Northeast, and would be coloquially referred to as Tony-Town). When Minneapolis was incorporated in 1858, alternative proposed names included Albion, All Saints, Lowell, Brooklyn, Addiseville and Winona.
Alternate universe nicknames in this scenario would have included: The Alb, A-Saint, L-Town, the Low, the BRK, Li’l Crooklyn, ADSVL and ‘Nona.
So it could be a lot worse.
