ORDER A SODA in Michigan or Minnesota and you’re clearly an outsider.
Ask for pop in New York City and you risk being ridiculed.
Bert Vaux, a linguistics professor
at Harvard University, says many Americans are overly passionate about
how they refer to the popular beverage family.
“For reasons that are unclear
to me people feel they have license to attack those who say pop as stupid
or illogical,” Vaux said. “I use Coke because I grew up in Houston. They’re
not too fond of that around here. However, it’s not as stigmatized as saying
pop.”
The pop-soda-Coke divide has always
created vague, and usually incorrect, assumptions about who says what where,
Vaux said. But for the first time, Internet technology - and 29,000 votes
on a Web site - has offered a definition of the debate’s borders.
The site, created eight years
ago as a college project, asks visitors to enter their childhood zip code
and the soft drink term they use. Their vote is then placed on a map as
a colored dot.
What has emerged is a swath of
Coke votes across the South, pop votes in the Midwest and Canada, and soda
votes in the Northeast and California, and - curiously - in St. Louis and
Milwaukee.
POP, SODA ARE TIED
Who’s winning? It’s, um, bottle neck and neck. Pop and soda each have
about 11,300 votes, or 39 percent. Coke has about 4,800 votes.
Aside from raw numbers from the
survey - whose scientific value is a matter of debate - the site features
posted messages from Web surfers who are passionate about their word for
the drink:
-Historically, the correct term
is ’phosphate,’ which was defined by soda jerks. ... Therefore soda is
clearly WRONG.
-Be aware that soft drink is common
in the South, where I am from, and using ‘pop’ or ‘soda’ will get you a
VERY peculiar look.
New Orleans resident Kristi Trentecosta, a Coke person, is one of those
who might look askance at people who say pop, a term she says is “creepy.”
“It’s kind of dorky. It’s kind
of like a ’gee wilikers,”’ she said. “It’s just one of those things that
always sounded odd to me. I’m sure there’s no good reason for it.”
Logic has little to do with a
person’s position on the pop-soda spectrum, Vaux said.
“A kid hearing pop growing up
in Ohio doesn’t think, ’Hmm, that isn’t sufficiently logical for me. I’m
not going to use it,” Vaux said. “They just use whatever they hear.”
FLORIDA IS SPLIT
When Alan McConchie was a freshman
at the California Institute of Technology in 1993, he broke the ice with
new classmates by asking, “Soda or pop?”
One Web page and almost 30,000 votes later,
the computer programmer is now a part-time linguist.
“Florida splits almost right in
half between saying Coke and soda - just like the Bush-Gore thing,” McConchie
said. “We’re learning that half of Florida is a Southern state and the
other half is people who moved in from the North.”
Seethu Seetharaman, a marketing
professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said McConchie’s data
isn’t reliable because it’s not a random sample.
But North Carolina State University
linguistics professor Walt Wolfram disagreed, saying the pop-soda-Coke
divide is regional and not based on race, age or income.
As for McConchie, he grew up in
pop country - in Washington state - but later moved to soda regions: California,
where he went to school, and New York state, where he makes his home. So
what does he call a bubbly beverage now?
“I don’t really drink it that
much anymore,” he said.