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The guy who runs the Pop vs. Soda page has really improved it. You can look at county level metrics just by hovering over the county. You can see counts, to get a good sense of the confidence in the representation of the underlying demographics. One thing that must be amended is that it’s not just soda vs. pop, there’s also coke in the South.
It is now very clear from these maps that there is an extremely sharp cline between the Middle Atlantic/New England region and the Great Lakes/Midwest on this dialect difference. I grew up in a soda region of upstate, though in the upper Hudson valley (95% soda), closer to New England than Syracuse. But in west-central New York you have counties right next to each other which are 60% vs. 15% pop, with reasonable sample sizes. Pennsylvania is similar. Clearfield county is 83% pop. Centre county just to the east is 19% pop (I know Centre county has Penn State, but the other counties around it are mostly soda as well).
In some places state lines matter a lot. Look at Oregon vs. California. The two “soda counties” in Oregon are more tied to the far north of California than the Willamette valley (the state of Jefferson). The Wisconsin-Illinois state line is a huge barrier as you approach Lake Michigan. But in other areas borders don’t matter so much. South Florida is part of soda territory, but that makes sense with its cultural history (lots of Jews with family roots in the Northeast). And there’s the huge zone that radiates out of St. Louis.
But in some ways the distribution of coke is the most interesting. First, state lines matter a lot in some areas. In the west there is a sharp drop off as one moves into Oklahoma, but an even sharper one into Kansas. Basically it’s the old Confederacy states, as Missouri has very little coke. As you move east it becomes more complicated. Northern Florida is part of the south, but you see in parts of Indiana that coke is a very common term for soft drinks. Why? It’s the “butternut” folk; descendants of Southerners who had settled large swaths of the Old Northwest. They retain connections and affinities with the South to this day.
Finally, on the Atlantic coast, you see the impact I suspect of border position and Northeastern migration into Virginia and North Carolina. The far west of North Carolina is like eastern Tennessee. West Virgina has an Appalachian extension in eastern Kentucky. State borders are less important in the east, just as is in the case further north. Cultural patterns that emerged organically when states were rather inchoate exist today in these regions, while newer states to the west were defined partly by their borders in terms of their cultural background (e.g., Kansas as a free state would be less appealing to Southern settlers culturally than if it was a slave state).
Those will more local knowledge can probably say more.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
Back when I went to the University of Missouri, there were always heated debates about this soda vs pop vs coke issue.
This is because although this might seem like a homogenous region from the outside, Columbia Missouri lies right on the pop/soda line. Also, there are huge numbers of students from surrounding states.
Your analogy to the civil war is certainly true. Just as in Mark Twain’s day, Northeastern Missouri is a place where brothers literally fight against brothers on cultural issues.
These maps don’t even show all the diversity. I actually grew up in the Ozark Mountains, and everyone said “sodapop”. I actually thought it was just one word as a kid. And then there are those “Dr. Pepper” southerners…
North Carolina is particularly unusual, as there’s the second largest percentage of “Other” responses (predominantly “drink” then “soft drink”) in the country.
The highest percentage of “Other” is found in Massachusetts, the local word “tonic.”
Within soda country there’s a hero versus sub thing going on for sandwiches. I grew up in Brooklyn, NY where sandwiches are called heroes but lived the past twenty years in Albany, NY where they are called subs.
Being from Central Illinois soda-land, I’ve never really understood these maps. While it appears that the soda-influence derives from St. Louis, that city does not have much other demonstrable economic or cultural influence in Central Illinois other than in baseball.
My going theory is that “soda” was a preferred term of the mid-nineteenth century Germans that made Milwaukee and St. Louis into beer cities. I don’t know this to be true, but the potential connection between beverages seems promising. Unfortunately, I also have to explain away other major German cities in the Midwest, such as Cincinnati and Louisville as places where Germans may not have obtained the necessary linguistic influence for some reason, or other demographic patterns overtook the soda-influence.
“Why? It’s the “butternut” folk; descendants of Southerners who had settled large swaths of the Old Northwest. They retain connections and affinities with the South to this day.”
Ok. From wikipedia (I’m not wading through Coca Cola’s website):
“The company is best known for its flagship product Coca-Cola, invented in 1886 by pharmacist John Stith Pemberton in Columbus, Georgia.[3]”
I’m presuming that the “butternut” folk settled in their areas before 1886. So what’s the mechanism by which these guys started using “coke” instead of “pop” like the guys next county over?
I’m from pop country. My wife was also raised in pop country, but did 10 years of post-graduate work in Madison, WI, which looks like it’s on the edge of a soda pocket. So she’s “soda” all the time. My theory is that people who do post-grad degrees have culturally formative years that extend far beyond other people’s formative years.
Pretty much all of Canada is “Pop” territory.
“Soda” I can understand, but “Coke”? Boggles the mind. I can’t imagine how those conversations play out.
Waiter: Would you like something to drink?
Customer: Sure, what kinds of Coke do you have?
Waiter: We have Coke, Sprite, ginger ale, and Orange Crush.
Customer: I’ll have a ginger ale then.
Kleenex instead of tissue
Q-Tip instead of cotton swab
Frigidaire instead of refrigeratorReplies: @Joe Q., @Michelle
True, but "soda" does get used in the Maritime provinces, Newfoundland, and it was used in the English Quebec of my youth -- I don't know about today.
One clear indicator from that map is that western New York (Buffalo, Tonawanda, Niagara Falls) is culturally part of the Midwest, quite distinct from Ithaca or Syracuse.
The Pop vs. Soda website has indeed been upgraded. Thanks for the post Mr. Khan.
John Thacker,
“Tonic” is still fairly common in New England, but less so than in the past. You hear it more among working class and older people.
My going theory is that "soda" was a preferred term of the mid-nineteenth century Germans that made Milwaukee and St. Louis into beer cities. I don't know this to be true, but the potential connection between beverages seems promising. Unfortunately, I also have to explain away other major German cities in the Midwest, such as Cincinnati and Louisville as places where Germans may not have obtained the necessary linguistic influence for some reason, or other demographic patterns overtook the soda-influence.Replies: @guy, @Chad, @Anonymous
Isn’t pop dominant in most german, scandi and northern english majority areas?
My going theory is that "soda" was a preferred term of the mid-nineteenth century Germans that made Milwaukee and St. Louis into beer cities. I don't know this to be true, but the potential connection between beverages seems promising. Unfortunately, I also have to explain away other major German cities in the Midwest, such as Cincinnati and Louisville as places where Germans may not have obtained the necessary linguistic influence for some reason, or other demographic patterns overtook the soda-influence.Replies: @guy, @Chad, @Anonymous
Not to mention that much of Pop land in the Midwest is heavily German (Upper Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, etc).
"Tonic" is still fairly common in New England, but less so than in the past. You hear it more among working class and older people.Replies: @bob sykes
When I was a boy in Methuen, MA (northeast), it was always “tonic.” Of course, we also called milk shakes “frappes.” That part of MA and neighboring NH is heavily French Canadian.
"Soda" I can understand, but "Coke"? Boggles the mind. I can't imagine how those conversations play out.
Waiter: Would you like something to drink?
Customer: Sure, what kinds of Coke do you have?
Waiter: We have Coke, Sprite, ginger ale, and Orange Crush.
Customer: I'll have a ginger ale then.Replies: @iffen, @cthulhu, @CJ
Brand name used as generic.
Kleenex instead of tissue
Q-Tip instead of cotton swab
Frigidaire instead of refrigerator
Anyone with working colour vision and taste buds can instantly tell the difference between Coke, Sprite, Ginger Ale and Orange Crush. The only things they have in common is that they are aqueous, fizzy, and sweet. Yet in some places they're all referred to as "Coke". It's as if paper towels and toilet paper were all called "Kleenex". Makes no sense.Replies: @iffen, @Justpassingby
I am thinking of a specific subset of Germans, the mid 19th Century immigrants that moved to large cities and started America’s beer industry (and in St. Louis, started what was once the largest U.S. wine region). Many would be ’48ers, liberal political dissidents, and were quite different from the vast number of Germans that came over time to farm. I don’t believe rural Germans (particularly those from unique religious backgrounds) were in a position to influence language, the way that those who successfully settled in major cities and started regional businesses.
I’ve been following this for years. It’s interesting that the two beer capitals of Milwaukee and St Louis are soda islands in a sea of pop. Maybe the national brewers are taking on soda drinkers across the land, and it caught on.
My in-laws and their neighbors in far-west Wisconsin love to distinguish themselves from Minnesotans in almost every way– it’s Packer country right up to the state line, just 25 mi from that expansion team over there– but they’re solid pop drinkers nonetheless. The state is evenly split by area, but 80 or 90% of the people live in the soda part.
Not all New York splits are upstate/downstate. I grew up there in soda country, and was shocked to learn (from Bill Kauffman) that western New Yorkers are popheads. Western upstate is only about two hundred years old, versus four hundred for the eastern part. Fewer ghosts.
Ok. From wikipedia (I'm not wading through Coca Cola's website):
"The company is best known for its flagship product Coca-Cola, invented in 1886 by pharmacist John Stith Pemberton in Columbus, Georgia.[3]"
I'm presuming that the "butternut" folk settled in their areas before 1886. So what's the mechanism by which these guys started using "coke" instead of "pop" like the guys next county over?Replies: @Razib Khan
I’m presuming that the “butternut” folk settled in their areas before 1886. So what’s the mechanism by which these guys started using “coke” instead of “pop” like the guys next county over?
can you fucking think this through before asking the question? you’ve said stupid shit before too, so this isn’t one-off.
presumably people in arkansas did not settle from georgia after 1900 (it was founded as a state ~1850). so how did that happen? because cultural-social affinities persist across distances. this is not *necessarily* the cause in this phenomenon, but the regional coherency of dialects etc. doesn’t occur through mass migration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Cities_Vowel_Shift
also, i presume that the difference on state lines in some areas is probably because of state-level distributorships.
Allow me a nerd moment.
P.C. Cast and her daughter Kristen Cast, who are Oklahoma authors who have written a series of books in a contemporary (early 21st century) Oklahoma setting (I believe that the books are collectively called the “House of Night” series). These books feature a heroine (who is for what it is worth, culturally, someone who grew up in suburban Tulsa and is of Cherokee descent) whose calls her favorite drink “brown pop” (which she used to refer in a brand indiscriminate way to non-diet Coke(R) and Pepsi(R)).
It is unclear from the context of the passages in the book if this is a regional dialect usage or if it is a turn of phrase particular to our heroine.
I’ve never been to Oklahoma and have only the most limited personal experience with Oklahoma natives who grew up speaking that dialect of American English spoken in Oklahoma, so I have no context to answer the question.
Does anyone know if “brown pop” is a term that is part of the regional Oklahoma dialect, or if just someone’s idiosyncratic personal terminology?
I suppose the St. Louis soda blob includes all the people who call them “soadies.”
Did you know the designer of the original curved coke bottle was from Indiana?
“Chapman J. Root moved to Terre Haute in 1900, opening a glass company incorporated on May 27, 1901, as Root Glass Works.
His company was bottling Coca-Cola by 1904. Root’s company would, however, change the worldwide image of Coke bottles in 1916.
His company’s bottle was selected from among 11 designs in a national competition. The bottle, designed after the image of a cocoa tree pod, was patented Nov. 16, 1915.
Root was a successful businessman 10 years before the Coca-Cola bottle was created. He employed more than 600 people in 1905; and by 1912, his work force had grown to 825, according to the Indiana Historian, a publication of the Indiana Historic Bureau.
The Coke bottle ensured Root’s fortune. In his 1916 contract with Coca-Cola, he was to receive 5 cents for every 144 bottles made. At the time of his death in 1945, Root left an estimated $11 million estate to his grandson, Chapman S. Root, according to the Indiana Historian.
Coca-Cola would play a major role in the Root family business for 66 years until 1982, when the family sold its 57.5 percent stock interest in the Associated Coca-Cola Bottling Co. for $417.5 million. The bottling company was the largest independent distributor of Coca-Cola products.”
Vigo County, Indiana (where Terre Haute is), well it’s pretty hard to scroll over on that map, even if you do know it is on the Illinois line. (FYI 38% pop, 14% soda, 46% Coke, 3% other, adds up to 99% curiously)
I’ll tell you what’s really dumb. I was actually trying to google historical data on how big a deal coke bottle production was in this area. I actually got curious as to whether anyone else made coke bottles. They used to reuse these things you know. No idea how many times, but it wouldn’t surprise me if one company made the bulk of them.
Then I came to my senses. Only winning move is not to play.
The linked Pop v. Soda website has pages which list the “other” responses by state. For OK, the most common “other” name was “soda pop,” and nobody listed “brown pop.” Never been to Oklahoma myself.
I wonder if media markets, advertising and the like play an important role too.
Florida native here, so I’ll add some state-specific observations in case anyone’s interested. The black coke clusters in the south of the state are the empty rural, in-land counties. People often mention the North-South cline in Florida, but there’s also an inland-coastal cline with similar cultural loadings. (This gets kind of complicated with Orlando, the only major peninsular inland metro). The farming communities of Hendry county are at the same latitude as Palm Beach, but might as well be in rural Georgia.
There also appears a lot of variation in Florida even across adjacent. What’s interesting is that in many cases the higher socioeconomic class county has a lower Coke percentage than its downscale neighbor. Example include Martin-St Lucie (Space Coast), Pinellas-Hillsborough (Tampa), Sarasota-Manatee (Gulf Coast), and Osceola-Polk (Orlando).
I’m surprised of the generally low prevalence of Pop. Especially on the gulf coast, which is historically known for being the destination of arrivals from the Midwest. The gulf coast counties do not seem to use Pop any more than the Northeast settled greater Miami.
My intuition is that the state line pattern is probably more about personal self-identification than it is about economics.
One of the important reasons that regional dialects develop from common languages in the first place is because communities of people want to develop easy ways to distinguish between insiders and outsiders. The feelings are often mutual and the dynamic is even seen in laboratory setting with simply artificial coding systems for communicating with team maters in multi-round games and no private means of communication.
For example, much of what is distinctive about the New England dialect (for example, the silent “h” common in Harvard circles) was invented on a grassroots basis for the express purpose of sounding wrong to people who spoke an upper class British accent at the time as a means of establishing a distinct community identity that wanted to poke it in the eye of their former overlords.
As books like Albion’s Seed demonstrate, American regional dialects didn’t start from a common source. They continued already differentiated dialects associated with different waves of migration from different parts of the British Isles. But, there was no obvious reason that this differentiation would have had to continue in words for new inventions like soda pop. Indeed, historically, many new products are given loan word names in a variety of not particularly closely related languages that reflect their name in the place of origin (like the word for “tea”).
The fact that a new product that could have had the same loan word name everywhere ended up having regionally distinct names that closely track pre-existing dialect regions anyway says to me that the Coke-Pop-Soda distinction we see today was a deliberate collective decision of late 19th century Americans in different regions to attempt to differentiate themselves from each other and affirm their regional identities. Southerners, New Englanders, and Midlanders very much wanted to speak in a way that distinguished them from the speakers of other dialects and the new product provided them with a rare forum in which they could collective assert their regional self-identification.
State lines are an important official marker of regional identity and thus, the way people leaned in adopting names for this new thing tended to track those lines.
I’m sorry that last thread got messed up, because I wanted to say I’m sorry your dad beat you up. It happened to my dad too, and it really screwed him up badly and me by extension. Hugging kids – even adolescent boys – works much better than beating them up. I’ve kind of made it my mission in life to stand by my boys (and even just boys in general) and defend them because of that kind of BS.
I once saw a grown man beating the crap out of a little boy when I was a little boy myself and to this day it still brings tears to my eyes to think of it.
"Soda" I can understand, but "Coke"? Boggles the mind. I can't imagine how those conversations play out.
Waiter: Would you like something to drink?
Customer: Sure, what kinds of Coke do you have?
Waiter: We have Coke, Sprite, ginger ale, and Orange Crush.
Customer: I'll have a ginger ale then.Replies: @iffen, @cthulhu, @CJ
That’s pretty much exactly how it plays out (I grew up in a region that was 50% Coke / 50% pop).
"Chapman J. Root moved to Terre Haute in 1900, opening a glass company incorporated on May 27, 1901, as Root Glass Works.
His company was bottling Coca-Cola by 1904. Root's company would, however, change the worldwide image of Coke bottles in 1916.
His company's bottle was selected from among 11 designs in a national competition. The bottle, designed after the image of a cocoa tree pod, was patented Nov. 16, 1915.
Root was a successful businessman 10 years before the Coca-Cola bottle was created. He employed more than 600 people in 1905; and by 1912, his work force had grown to 825, according to the Indiana Historian, a publication of the Indiana Historic Bureau.
The Coke bottle ensured Root's fortune. In his 1916 contract with Coca-Cola, he was to receive 5 cents for every 144 bottles made. At the time of his death in 1945, Root left an estimated $11 million estate to his grandson, Chapman S. Root, according to the Indiana Historian.
Coca-Cola would play a major role in the Root family business for 66 years until 1982, when the family sold its 57.5 percent stock interest in the Associated Coca-Cola Bottling Co. for $417.5 million. The bottling company was the largest independent distributor of Coca-Cola products."
Vigo County, Indiana (where Terre Haute is), well it's pretty hard to scroll over on that map, even if you do know it is on the Illinois line. (FYI 38% pop, 14% soda, 46% Coke, 3% other, adds up to 99% curiously)
I'll tell you what's really dumb. I was actually trying to google historical data on how big a deal coke bottle production was in this area. I actually got curious as to whether anyone else made coke bottles. They used to reuse these things you know. No idea how many times, but it wouldn't surprise me if one company made the bulk of them.
Then I came to my senses. Only winning move is not to play.Replies: @Razib Khan
not a bad comment. bravo!
Growing up in St. Louis, it was always soda. We looked down upon people who said pop as unsophisticated. St. Louis used to be a sort of eastern colony since it was the oldest large city in the west and has an eastern vibe in parts.
OK, my overall theory, though speculative:
Soda is most suggestive of soda fountains, which were located in cities and towns and competed on the basis of a variety of flavors, both with innovations and standards. Bottling is a later phenomena, it was messy and a poor product until the crown cork bottle cap was invented in 1892. Before then bottles would prematurely “pop” when the corks dried out. One of the advantages of bottling was that it made soft drinks available to rural and smaller communities. Generally, the older Atlantic coast communities maintained the preference and association for the traditional soda fountains. Over the Appalachians, the newer communities lacked as strong an association because soda fountains arrived too close to successful bottling.
Coke emerged from the first successful franchise arrangement in U.S. history in which Coca-Cola, focussed on the soda fountain business, essentially gave away the right to bottle its soft drink to some business-men who carved up the country and sold exclusive territorial bottling rights. Those who obtained these local monopolies became prominent families in the South, building mansions, aiding philanthropies and starting new businesses. This happened in the South, much moreso than anywhere else, because (a) soft drinks were considered a warm weather drink; (b) lack of competition from alcoholic beverages; and (c) lack of a prominent business men on the scale of a Ford or Carnegie, which made the bottlers giants in their domain.
Kleenex instead of tissue
Q-Tip instead of cotton swab
Frigidaire instead of refrigeratorReplies: @Joe Q., @Michelle
I don’t think it’s that simple. We’re not talking about all types of cola being referred to as Coke (which I could understand, and which would be analogous to your examples) but rather all types of soft drink regardless of their flavour or colour.
Anyone with working colour vision and taste buds can instantly tell the difference between Coke, Sprite, Ginger Ale and Orange Crush. The only things they have in common is that they are aqueous, fizzy, and sweet. Yet in some places they’re all referred to as “Coke”. It’s as if paper towels and toilet paper were all called “Kleenex”. Makes no sense.
I should have written facial tissue.
I can't do anything about it not making sense.
We referred to soft drinks as "soda-pop". So much so, that I've never understood why that compound word is never offered as a choice in these sorts of surveys.
We knew the word "pop" from movies and TV shows with, e.g., NYC locales, but didn't use it.
The word "soda", by itself, referred to ice cream concoctions such as chocolate or strawberry sodas.
When we grew older, soda-pop was deemed to be a kid's drink, and we then referred to all soft drinks as "cokes":
"Let's get a coke"
"Okay"
"What do you want?
"Give me a root beer."
Why "coke"? Looking back, I think it may have been due to the fact that, at least in our area, Coca-Cola was the first to put dispensing "towers" in soda fountains and drug store/5-&-Dime lunch counters (the fast-food outlets of their day). These towers displayed the coke logo.
The towers dispensed a finished product. The counter person no longer had to mix syrup and fizz water together to make a Coke. They also dispensed one or two other soft drinks the Coca-Cola distributer might carry.
And it dispensed plain fizz water. So, if you ordered a Green River or a Cherry Fizz, the counter person would pump a portion of those syrups into a glass and then go to the coke tower to get the fizz water.
In other words, in those places, any soft drink you ordered would come, one way or another, from the tower displaying the Coca-Cola logo. Hence, they were all "cokes".
"Soda" I can understand, but "Coke"? Boggles the mind. I can't imagine how those conversations play out.
Waiter: Would you like something to drink?
Customer: Sure, what kinds of Coke do you have?
Waiter: We have Coke, Sprite, ginger ale, and Orange Crush.
Customer: I'll have a ginger ale then.Replies: @iffen, @cthulhu, @CJ
Pretty much all of Canada is “Pop” territory.
True, but “soda” does get used in the Maritime provinces, Newfoundland, and it was used in the English Quebec of my youth — I don’t know about today.
One clear indicator from that map is that western New York (Buffalo, Tonawanda, Niagara Falls) is culturally part of the Midwest, quite distinct from Ithaca or Syracuse.
The Pop vs. Soda website has indeed been upgraded. Thanks for the post Mr. Khan.
Anyone with working colour vision and taste buds can instantly tell the difference between Coke, Sprite, Ginger Ale and Orange Crush. The only things they have in common is that they are aqueous, fizzy, and sweet. Yet in some places they're all referred to as "Coke". It's as if paper towels and toilet paper were all called "Kleenex". Makes no sense.Replies: @iffen, @Justpassingby
We are saying that all types of cola were(is) called Coke and that it spilled over to orange, grape, ginger ale, etc. Actually in the olden days it was Co-Cola or Co-Coler depending on where you were. We don’t even need to mention that it was frequently just ordered as a “dope”.
I should have written facial tissue.
I can’t do anything about it not making sense.
Here’s an interesting piece on the origins of Indiana’s Southerners.
http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/imh/article/view/10725/15161
I don’t have a copy handy, but I seem to recall something in Albion’s Seed about the “Southern Salient.” Or maybe it was Cracker Culture. (Or both.)
You young whippersnappers may have missed this 1979 movie featuring the “cutters” (chaw-meets-limestone) of Indiana:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Away
Speaking as a Coke Native, all I can say is bear in mind that English is the language in which “fat chance” and “thin chance” mean exactly the same thing.
@Iffen My father-in-law never called them anything but “diet dopes.”
Must be from southern Russia.
http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/imh/article/view/10725/15161I don't have a copy handy, but I seem to recall something in Albion's Seed about the "Southern Salient." Or maybe it was Cracker Culture. (Or both.)You young whippersnappers may have missed this 1979 movie featuring the "cutters" (chaw-meets-limestone) of Indiana:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Away
@Joe Q. Speaking as a Coke Native, all I can say is bear in mind that English is the language in which "fat chance" and "thin chance" mean exactly the same thing.@Iffen My father-in-law never called them anything but "diet dopes."Replies: @iffen
My father-in-law
Must be from southern Russia.
@Iffen Come to think of it, RC Cola was always RC C0-cola, as in “RC C0-cola n’ a Moon-pie, please.”
I’ve often heard St. Louis described as the last Eastern City, and it seems true particularly in the areas around Forest Park. But it’s not more Eastern than Chicago or Pittsburgh which are clearly “pop” cities. In my experience Chicagoans think people who say “soda” are unsophisticated.
I doubt very few young people respond to his survey; mostly older people like us. He specifies that you should select what you learned as a child. The use of Coke as generic for all soft drinks is dated. None of my children or grandchildren use it.
I actually drank Double Colas and ate Hinky-Dinky “moon pies.” That should have tipped me off that something was wrong with me then, but I wasn’t paying attention.
I live in Chicago now and it seems to me that white collar people here say soda and blue collar ones say pop.
I'm from San Francisco from an old family and if I heard someone say pop would just assume they were from somewhere rural far away. We all used soda
My going theory is that "soda" was a preferred term of the mid-nineteenth century Germans that made Milwaukee and St. Louis into beer cities. I don't know this to be true, but the potential connection between beverages seems promising. Unfortunately, I also have to explain away other major German cities in the Midwest, such as Cincinnati and Louisville as places where Germans may not have obtained the necessary linguistic influence for some reason, or other demographic patterns overtook the soda-influence.Replies: @guy, @Chad, @Anonymous
Cincinnati and Louisville were very Baden, a Francophile group of Germans that preferred wine to beer, sauces on their entrees,etc. They were not the “soda” crowd.
Kleenex instead of tissue
Q-Tip instead of cotton swab
Frigidaire instead of refrigeratorReplies: @Joe Q., @Michelle
Still say Tupperware for plastic food containers!
wife who grew up right outside Chicago says all soda. Her mother is Irish from the South side
I’m from San Francisco from an old family and if I heard someone say pop would just assume they were from somewhere rural far away. We all used soda
Anyone with working colour vision and taste buds can instantly tell the difference between Coke, Sprite, Ginger Ale and Orange Crush. The only things they have in common is that they are aqueous, fizzy, and sweet. Yet in some places they're all referred to as "Coke". It's as if paper towels and toilet paper were all called "Kleenex". Makes no sense.Replies: @iffen, @Justpassingby
I grew up in southern Arizona in the 50’s & 60’s.
We referred to soft drinks as “soda-pop”. So much so, that I’ve never understood why that compound word is never offered as a choice in these sorts of surveys.
We knew the word “pop” from movies and TV shows with, e.g., NYC locales, but didn’t use it.
The word “soda”, by itself, referred to ice cream concoctions such as chocolate or strawberry sodas.
When we grew older, soda-pop was deemed to be a kid’s drink, and we then referred to all soft drinks as “cokes”:
“Let’s get a coke”
“Okay”
“What do you want?
“Give me a root beer.”
Why “coke”? Looking back, I think it may have been due to the fact that, at least in our area, Coca-Cola was the first to put dispensing “towers” in soda fountains and drug store/5-&-Dime lunch counters (the fast-food outlets of their day). These towers displayed the coke logo.
The towers dispensed a finished product. The counter person no longer had to mix syrup and fizz water together to make a Coke. They also dispensed one or two other soft drinks the Coca-Cola distributer might carry.
And it dispensed plain fizz water. So, if you ordered a Green River or a Cherry Fizz, the counter person would pump a portion of those syrups into a glass and then go to the coke tower to get the fizz water.
In other words, in those places, any soft drink you ordered would come, one way or another, from the tower displaying the Coca-Cola logo. Hence, they were all “cokes”.
Interesting. I’m from Peoria and went to U of I (Champaign) in the late 80s for undergrad, and the Chicago suburbanites were all-over the backward downstaters for their soda. I always assumed it was one of the usual Chicago vs. downstate things and remember being surprised to learn that STL used soda also.