Do you want to Come With?

I like Midwesterners.

I mean, one doesn't move to Minneapolis-St. Paul from sunny Los Angeles, only because one dreams of falling in love with a voluptuous and rugged Amazonian, Nordic woman who chops wood all day and cooks for you in her cabin while you lounge around in silk pajamas, reading the poetry of Rupert Brooke and drinking bottles of Cabernet, before spending the night with your face nestled into her ample, farm girl bosom.

No. One moves to Minnesota because one loves the people. He admires their constant cheerfulness, their glacial smiles and their hard work at breaking the icy, tundra soil and building something akin to Western civilization here. He respects their disregard for the trendy and fashionable (Mark Twain mentioned wanting to be in Cincinnati during the apocalypse because everything is 20 years behind; let's just say that one could potentially say this about the entire Midwest), their passion for putting cream of mushroom soup mix and Bisquick into nearly everything "edible," their sweet country manners, and those delightful flat accents with the elongated vowels.

So people of the Upper Midwest, consider me to be your dear friend and ally. After all, I am in the process of becoming your biographer.

But since we're friends, I need to be a little candid here. There's a couple of things you do and say that are really, really annoying to me...

I will now address one of my linguistic grievances. Let's start with an example.

Standard American English Statement: "Do you want to come with me to the movies?"

Minnesota-speak Statement: "Do you want to come with?"

This is incredibly annoying. And how difficult is it to add me to this statement? I mean, unless you've recently had a stroke, there's really no excuse for not adding an essential extra word or two or three.

It is all rude to place the demands of figuring out the context of every "come with" statement onto the recipient's shoulders.

When someone asks me that they want me to come with or they mention someone coming with, I often don't recognize the context of this statement. Which requires me to ask a follow-up question that could have been easily avoided had they been clear and precise in their initial statement.

Come with what? A ham sandwich? A handgun?

Come with whom? You? The guy down the street? The president?

This isn't Little House on the bloody Prairie. "Come with" is not charming and precious. It's annoying and stunted and stupid-sounding. And far too vague. And you folks need to work on this.