Soda vs. Pop: explanations
Update: A Google Maps based survey is up. You can vote, so please do!
Every few years I post this map. Anyone have good explanations for some of the patterns? (e.g., what’s going on around St. Louis and Milwaukee?) Larger fine-grained version below the fold. I would say that one inference that you could make is that the fact that “Soda” has penetrated the territory of “non-Soda” through either migration or cultural emulation. The concentrations in south Florida, northern Virginia and the Research Triangle are pretty good evidence of this, as well as Denver.
Well… Here in Montana we all know that flavored, carbonated, beverages are to be referred to as POP. Soda is what one adds to biscuit recipes or Scotch and a couple of ice cubes and Coke is very similar to Pepsi. As for the people around St Louis, I can’t say. I do know one thing that’s very irritating, to me at least, and that’s when someone calls it sody (soh’ dee).
http://www.chrismore.com/sodapop/
Seems like most states in the Mid-west, South-west and the South have a blotch or two of green. Wonder if those are cities.
Milwaukee and St. Louis have long had substantial German-origin populations. Could that in some way be related to their use of soda?
The concentration of ‘soda’ use in California is highest around SF, which is where there was the highest immigration from the Northeast. So that’s clearly where the usage originated in the US.
My guess for Milwaukee and St. Louis is that the national beer breweries hired marketing departments from Madison Avenue who brought the eastern usage with them, and used ‘soda’ when advertising soft drinks locally.
Looks like Cincinnati falls into the Coke belt. I didn’t notice that when I lived there, but I’m not at all surprised.
I grew up (b. 1936) in the NE, lived in NY, PA,
and the DC area. Until I began to travel rather extensively by hitch-hiking (c.1950), I never heard any other term than “soda,” though was vaguely aware that that term itself was a shortened version of “soda-pop,” used by fogeys I never met.
Over the next 15 years or so, in travelling in 40 states and a hitch in the Army, I became aware of regional expression differences. Two are most prevalent: soda/pop and bag/sack/poke. But the most striking thing (about the survey) is, that in all that time, I NEVER–even once–heard the term “coke” used in a generic sense for “soft drink,” though it might occasionally have been employed as a generic for a cola drink. (Even now, waiters and waitresses, asked for “a Coke,” are liable to furnish Pepsi or to ask whether “Pepsi would be OK?” but I’ve–again, NEVER, anywhere,–heard one ask “What kind of Coke would you like?”
One curious “other” that I’ve heard is “dope,” an expression probably arising from a time when Coke
still contained some of the real stuff (prior to 1895, I believe). And that term was restricted (in my experience) to a small area of extreme western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, though I wouldn’t be surprised to find it in adjoining portions of Appalachia. Further, “dope” had become a generic term for soft drink, so a customer might very well ask for “an orange dope.” But the generically-used “Coke” (and particularly its wide geographic distribution really does surprise me (though, rather than persuade me that my former experience was not truly etymologically representative, it inclines me to the view that such usages can change comparatively quickly, especially under the influence of mass media catering to generational cohorts. I’ve remarked previously in this space on my similar view with respect to the phrase “from the git-go” and variants thereof.).
What happened to “tonic.” I grew up in NE Massachusetts, and “tonic” was by far the most common term for a carbonated soft drink. I believe it still is.
We also called milkshakes “frappes.”
I am from the south, and here the standard way to offer someone a drink is to ask two questions:
1) Do you want a coke?
2) What kind?
The word “coke” can refer to any carbonated beverage, it is not assumed that you’re asking if they want a Coca-Cola.
Gene,
I knew people from Alabama, who had lived in New York for years, but still referred to Soda as Coke – I first met the term through them about a decade ago.
My mother and her friends (Northeast Alabama, early 20th century), near where coke bottling started, had another name. They called them “dopes.”
Where I grew up in Scotland, we called all those fizzy drinks “lemonade” while knowing that elsewhere in the country they were known as “pop” or as “juice” – and there are probably other names that I’ve forgotten or never come across. Favourite “lemonades” included ‘Raspberryade’, ‘Cherryade’ and ‘American Cream Soda’.
We also called milkshakes “frappes.”
Yeah, and if you ask for a “milkshake” in New England the waitress puts a spoonful of malt in a glass of milk and shakes it up. This comes as quite a nasty shock to normal humans.
When my daughter was five she got a “little ballerina” dance set which included a video tape. I woke up at six am Christmas morning to the sound of her playing that damn thing. Me being somewhat new to living in Canada I was surprised at hearing it in French. I wandered into the Katrina style mess of shredded wrapping paper and asked her if the entire tape was in French, to which she replied, “no, it plays through once in human and then in French.”
Check out this guy…
http://www.uwm.edu/~vaux/
http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/maps.html
What happened to “tonic.” I grew up in NE Massachusetts, and “tonic” was by far the most common term for a carbonated soft drink. I believe it still is.
if you follow the link you’ll see a substantial minority in the boston area still use that term.
I’ve only ever lived in “soda” country (Delaware and the SF Bay Area), but I’ve heard people use “pop”, rarely, and “soda-pop” a little more frequently. I’ve never, ever, heard someone use “coke” as a generic for all soda, just as a generic for cola.
The counties around the Peoria, IL area seem to be soda areas. I am a recent transplant to the area and Peoria seems to be influenced by St. Louis by this and many other things. BTW they all call bags “sacks” here. Like a store clerk saying “do you want that in a sack?” as opposed to “do you want that in a bag?” I wonder what the bag to sack breakdown is?
Luke Lea:
The slice of Alabama you cite is probably what
I’d previously noted as being “adjoining” the
west-NC and east-TN mountain district.
There’s another language peculiarity found in the region: a use of “hain’t?” (and sometimes “hain’t I?”) at the end of sentence, somewhat akin to
“isn’t it?” or “aren’t I?”, though used where those others would seem out of place–though that may be my own inability to comprehend the unifying rationale).
It would seem that proximity to Canada largely determines what term is used …
Hey!
Richard Sharpe:
You got it backwards! It’s proximity to Mexico that makes the dif (though some say to Haiti!).
For a little trivia, the anomalous area around Columbus, Georgia, is probably related to the fact that RC Cola (a brand many of you may not know) was based there.
Curiously, there doesn’t seem to be a common one-word term now used in England. It probably used to be ‘pop’, but this would now sound very old-fashioned, only used by elderly people. I have never heard ‘soda’ used for any drink other than soda water, or ‘Coke’ for anything other than Coca Cola. The standard two-word term would probably be ‘fizzy drink’ for a carbonated drink, or ‘soft drink’ for any non-alcoholic cold drink.
I’ve seen this map posted in the past and I believe the hypothesis was that the Pop-Soda split grew out of Catholic – Protestant breakdowns. Here in Southeastern Wisconsin the Catholic population is more concentrated along Lake Michigan (all those Germans and Poles) so you get the strip of green along the lake. But I don’t remember where I saw that so I can’t give a citation.
My maternal grandparents, both from the Scranton PA area, insist on calling what everyone knows to be a bell pepper a “mango.” Apparently, this is not unusual thereabouts. Oddly, they also call a mango a mango. I wonder what happened there…
In the Southwest it might be partial spanish influence as the Spanish word for it along the texas and new mexico borders at least, is “Soda” (sOh-dah) with a hard long “O” sound.
In Scotland, particularly Glasgow, they call it ‘juice’!
I live in Milwaukee. We call it “soda” because the FIBs call it “pop”, so obviously “pop” is an abomination unto God.
I’ve lived in the St. Louis area my whole life and I’ve always been surprised when people from as close as Kansas City or Chicago are puzzled or even offended by my use of the term “soda”. I have no idea why St. Louis is an island of soda in the Midwest, but I have to assume it has to do with German heritage, catholic heritage, or the brewery. During prohibition Anheuser Busch produced soft drinks, maybe they marketed it as “soda”?
I would suspect that there is actually more historical influence on the usage rather than religious. Coca-Cola having been invented in Atlanta in 1886, “Coke” as the generic is a Southern thing (I’m 3/4 Texan and that’s the usage I grew up with in SW Colorado, though some used “pop”.) The exception, as noted above, is that “cola” is also used as a generic in some Southern areas, and probably reflects strong local distribution of RC Cola.
It looks like the distribution of “Soda” is in those areas more urbanized prior to, say, 1860 or maybe earlier where soda-fountains would have set the fashion (the NE, San Fran, St Louis) and before the widespread shipping of the pre-concoted, bottled product, which, when uncorked, put the “pop” in soda-pop.
I’d also guess that the barely post-reconstruction South didn’t have nearly as many options in soft drinks as, say, Fargo, ND, so the use of a specific generic (as it were), and most likely their only, choice of “Coke” was logical below the Mason-Dixon.
“It looks like the distribution of “Soda” is in those areas more urbanized prior to, say, 1860 or maybe earlier where soda-fountains would have set the fashion (the NE, San Fran, St Louis) and before the widespread shipping of the pre-concoted, bottled product, which, when uncorked, put the “pop” in soda-pop.”
I’d say you have a point except that Chicago is firmly in the “pop” category.
I moved from Washington State to NC in the 50′s, and had previously referred to all carbonated beverages as “pop”. The old folks of my youth called it”sody-pop”. When I came to NC, all the people I met referred to any carbonated beverage as “a drink” or “a soft drink”.They only said “coke” when they actually meant a coke. Some of the older people called it “Co-Cola”.
My mother-in-law (from NC) had quite a round with a gas-station attendant in Baltimore when she asked for a “drink” and he informed her that they didn’t sell drinks. After she figured out that he thought she wanted “hard likker” she was highly insulted.
Your large map offers dots which appear to represent Winnipeg, Brandon and Dauphin, Manitoba, and Regina, Moose Jaw and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; I grew up in Brandon and have spent lots of time in all these places. Your map shows “pop” as used in Winnipeg, Dauphin, Moose Jaw and Saskatoon, and “coke” in Brandon and Regina.
In all these places, such beverages are normally called “soft drinks”. People know what “pop” is but they don’t use that expression; I recall hearing it for the first time in Ottawa, and thinking I’d landed on Mars. And nobody has ever heard of “coke” as anything other than a short form of “Coca-Cola”. Inded, I first learned of such broader usage coming to your site today.
Interestingly, “soft drink” seems to originate in Montreal, and would have come west on the Canadian Pacific Railway. The common (not universal) Quebec French term “liqueur douce” is one of the distinctive Quebec French terms that was originally a translation from the local English.
I was born and reared in Dallas. If asked, I said I would like a coke. The waitress would reply “what kind” and I would say Dr. Pepper please ma?am.
In high school, I moved to Columbus, Ohio. I quickly learned that pop was their proper term for a coke. They also called groups (like rock groups such as The Police) bands, which I always found odd. And only rarely did you hear the word ma?am.
In college, I moved to Arizona. They would have nothing to do with calling it a coke or pop but insisted upon soda. This reminded me of the black kids at my elementary school who called a coke soda water.
Now I live in Northern Virginia and have no idea what to call the darn things.
My family is spread out across much of Illinois, and I remember hearing all three terms growing up. My grandmother (and me and my sister, largely raised by her, though we also used “soda” pronounced as “so-dah”) used “coke,” one set of cousins used “soda” (pronounced “so-dee”) and a couple Chicago-area cousins used “pop.”
“What kind of so-dee do you want, Grandmother?”
“Just get me a white coke, dear.”
(7up, Sprite, etc. were all “white cokes” to my grandmother.)