Can you take NJ out of the Girl?

People around these parts (Bloomington, Indiana) will often comment to me, "you're not from around here," or ask "are you from NY?" and then get very nervous if I ask them what makes them think so. The truth is that it is hard to take New Jersey out of the girl, and even though this girl, on and off, has lived in Indiana since 1992, there are parts of my personality and driving habits that scream east coast.

I thought you might enjoy a column from the Chicago Tribune on the subject of midwest calm, a quality attributd to Judge Roberts, the lastest nominee to the Supreme Court. The piece features my colleague, Craig Bradley, who is in fine form. Some have suggested that "calm" is a code word for non-Jewish (just as New Yorker is a code word for Jewish).


`Midwest calm': What's that supposed to mean?
By Nara Schoenberg
Tribune staff reporter
July 22, 2005
Plato wrote in praise of calm, as did Wordsworth.
Calm is good when a tornado is approaching.
But when The New York Times quotes a former colleague of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts Jr.'s, who grew up in Indiana, as saying he possesses a "Midwest calm"?
Hmmm. We're not so sure.
On the one hand, Midwesterners are indeed a relatively low-key lot, prone, statistically speaking, to understatement and self-deprecation. Not prone, in general, to temper tantrums.
On the other hand, calm?
"That is such an interesting word, calm," says Ruth Olson, associate director of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the University of Wisconsin, who sees links between the concept of "Midwest calm" and the more widely used "Minnesota nice," which is not necessarily a compliment.
Indiana University law professor Craig Bradley, who hails from a suburb of Chicago -- city of "brawny, brawling, big shouldered, calm types," he deadpans -- is less diplomatic.
"I think when Easterners describe people from Indiana, if they use the word calm, what they're trying to say is 'uninteresting,' " he says.
Midwesterners don't tend to use the word calm in referring to themselves. A search of newspaper articles nationwide turns up only a handful of non-weather related references to "Midwest calm," all of them in New York, Boston and California.
***
Bradley, who knows Roberts, says he is indeed a "an even-tempered, calm guy, not real excitable, and, more importantly I would say, not real ideological," but whether he's any calmer than anyone else from the Midwest, "I don't know."
Adds Bradley, with the wry understatement that has sometimes also been associated with this region, "I guess he probably was considered uninteresting -- until he got on the short list for the Supreme Court."