HAHA! Dave Barry:

Boy, am I in trouble with the Hoosiers.

''Hoosiers,'' of course, is what people from Indiana proudly call themselves, and for an excellent reason, which I will explain shortly. Unfortunately, I managed to get a batch of Hoosiers very upset recently, when I wrote a column about which is the stupidest state.

For the record, I did NOT say that Indiana is the stupidest state. I believe that many states, including mine, are stupider than Indiana. What I did say -- and I now realize that I was wrong -- was that ''Hoosier'' is a stupid nickname. My argument was that nobody seemed to know what a ''Hoosier'' is, so why would you go around calling yourself one? I stated that, for all we know, ''Hoosier'' could be a Native American word for ``has sex with caribou.''

Many people wrote in to object, strongly, to that statement, including one Hoosier who pointed out that -- and it is hard to argue with this logic -- ''Indiana has no caribou.'' Several Native Americans were also quite upset, so let me first apologize to them, and state for the record that ''Hoosier'' is NOT a Native American word for ''has sex with caribou.'' I am sure there IS no Native American word for ''has sex with caribou,'' at least not referring to residents of Indiana, although I imagine there might be a Native American term to describe caribou having sex with other caribou, and I think we can all agree that this is perfectly proper...

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