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Pop and Soda debate goes national
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“Bubble jerk,” “Swigula” and “that fizzy bubbly sugary yummy floofy stuff” are a few of the responses in a recent survey that asked what people call their soft drinks. Whatever you dub your drink, you had better call it pop in Wisconsin to avoid mockery. If you are coming from the east coast where you call it soda or the south where a Pepsi is a coke, then you too may face belittlement.
“I call it soda,” said Dhaval Mistry, a University of Wisconsin sophomore from Rochester, Minnesota. “Pop sounds redneck and coke is just wrong.”
According to a survey conducted by Alan McConchie, a graduate student of computer science at the California Institute of Technology, Mistry is living in the wrong place for his dialect.
McConchie’s Internet survey has reached over 90,000 people. The survey reveals the Midwest is definitely ‘pop’ country. East coasters say ‘soda,’ while folks down south call it ‘coke’.
There are pockets of resistance, however. Those from Massachusetts live in a nether world and call it tonic, while in Milwaukee a pop is a soda.
“There are not only lexical divisions — that is, different words in different places — but quite different pronunciations of the same word in different parts of the country,” said Rob Kaplan, a professor of linguistics at the University of Southern California. “It doesn’t surprise me that there are different isoglosses for soft drinks.
One other item that has been studied is the deli sandwich. In some places it’s called a hoagie. In some places a submarine and so on.”
Compared to other dialect debates, the pop, soda and coke debate is one of the more heated ones.
“That one seems to get a lot of people really riled up over it,” said David Bowie, an expert on dialect from Brigham Young University in Utah, a predominantly pop state. “For the most part, we have differences in words, and we just deal with it. For example, whether you call something a traffic signal, a traffic light or a stoplight, people have different preferences, but they don’t argue about it.”
On McConchie’s “Pop vs. Soda” website, the magnitude of the debate is revealed in a haze of name-calling and cutting remarks.
“Pop, is this word used to describe soda because of the carbonation or the noise it makes when the can is opened?” one comment asked. “I asked someone in Indiana once why she called it pop and that was her answer … don’t call a cat meow. I don’t call a baby waaa. Please.
As I look at my soda on my desk now, it says plain as day on the can ‘A&W Cream Soda.’ If the company that is producing the product has labeled it as soda, then my friends it is [trademarked] and ready to go as soda. Just accept it… Pop is what you call yer daddy. Soda is what you call your beverage.”
As for a national winner, the title goes to pop and soda. Each has about 35,000 votes. Coke lagged with roughly 17,000 and oddball responses number 4,500.
The great pop vs. soda debate can be found at www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~almccon/pop_soda/
Whatever the consensus, it seems the debate will not soon die. “I’m from southern Maryland and I call it coke,” Bowie said. “We get some soda and coke, but no pop.”
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