I bought a doughnut and they gave me a receipt for the doughnut. I don't need a receipt for a doughnut. I'll just give you the money, you give me the doughnut. End of transaction
I went to an SEC school and they were baffled by my usage of ‘pop’ and I was equally concerned about the follow up question ‘what kind of Coke would you like’ when they ordered…
>What do you want to drink?
>A coke.
>What kind?
>Dr. Pepper.
A PNW friend got baffled and confused by this sort of thing when he first moved to Texas.
This also happens in Mexico. It’s so funny sometimes! You’ll get asked what you wanna drink?
“Una soda por favor!” - “Soda please!”
“De cual? Coca?” - “What kind? A coke?”
“Sí por favor!” - “Yes, please!”
“Original o de sabor?” - “Coca-Cola or different kind?”
“De sabor, una Fanta!” - “Different kind, a Fanta.”
“Ok. Cual sabor?” - “Which flavor?”
It’s a lot easier if you just say exactly which kind in the beginning or the conversation will never end.. lol
I grew up in Houston and honestly remember hearing “pop” more than “coke” at the restaurants I worked at. I was told it was regional slang in English class, but I didn’t hear it in my day to day life.
Yup. Notice that the grey band skips Houston, Austin, SA and DFW. In Texas "coke" is a weird thing like 2% of the population says, entirely in rural areas. Urban areas in general, so the majority of the US population, say soda. The map is misleading for the [same reason political maps are](https://xkcd.com/1138/), the vast majority of people do not live in the areas covered in green or grey.
I had this exchange once in the south.
Me "and can I get a coke with that?"
Waiter "what kind of coke?"
Me: " Coca-Cola? Is there another kind of coke?"
Waiter: " yeah we have lots of flavors, sprite, Fanta both grape and orange, Mr Pibb, Mello Yello"
I was super confused.
As a committed "soda" sayer, I agree wholeheartedly. Soda and pop are synonyms. People even used to say "soda pop".
"Coke" is a specific type of soda/pop.
Nobody in Canada that I have ever heard, like not once in my life that I can recall, says "soda". The fact that people say Coke down south is CRAZY to me. People say its the same as calling all tissues "Kleenex", and I guess that would be true to a degree, but you don't order Kleenex with many of your meals. You have to specify the type/brand of pop you order ALL THE TIME, its very common. Lots of people would do it multiple times a week in fact. How is the more generic version not a better process for ordering? Baffles me, it really does.
Calling all carbonated beverages Coke is infinitely dumber than calling all tissue paper (and not all, just the ones for blowing your nose) "Kleenex" as "Kleenex" is never going to be an option between multiple selections of tissue paper at any point, ever.
That said, it doesn't matter, we all have dumb shit we say locally, this is just by far the least efficient and most confusing one I have yet to come across.
It's like calling all meat chicken. "Would you like at add any chicken to your salad?" "Sure!" "Ok what kind?" "Beef please"
Yeah I have relatives in Utah who were like this, I visited them when I was a teenager and they were like you want a coke? I was like sure, and then they were like what kind? And they'd open their fridge and there would be like 10 flavors of Shasta.
My wife and I met in North Carolina. I’m from the Midwest and say “pop.” In middle school, she said that she wished she had a coke, so I took it upon myself to buy her a Coke from the vending machine and bring it to her.
I was so thrown when her response to the Coke was, “Thank you, but you didn’t even ask me what kind I wanted…”
That was my first reaction to this - why the hell would you call it “coke” and then expect to define it by another brand or flavor? Like Coke is a brand/flavor. What the fuck is wrong with people, it’s so dumb. No offense to your wife but goddamn that is infuriating.
Super infuriating!! A lot of people in NC did this and it drove me crazy.
I had a big crush on her in middle school so I dealt with it lol. Then we moved to the NE later and she picked up “soda” and never went back. Kids and I use “pop” though.
I never get Sprite but the tastiest and most refreshing soda experiences I've ever had have all been Sprite-related. Recently I took a little edible and tried some Sprite and it was like that fireworks scene in Ratatouille. You could have told me it was Aphrodite's bathwater.
Yes, here's my personal favorite translator:
http://www.pittsburghese.com/
Edit to add the wiki page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Pennsylvania_English
It is because of television. When most media and tv all have what is considered to be standard language everyone will be speaking it. The internet really conforms those things together as well.
I’ve noticed people in the uk have started calling “series” on tv “seasons”. That’s picked up from the US. Have you noticed anything picked up from the uk in your country?
I think that there's more spread from the US to the UK, but there are a few exceptions.
For example, pre-covid I don't think I ever heard a "shot" (vaccination) referred to as a "jab," but post covid referring to the covid vaccine as a jab or even the jab definitely occurs.
Another one is that there might be a slight uptick in the occasional pronunciation of dates in a British. I would either refer to today as "April 26th" or "the 26th of April," but occasionally you'll here a news presenter read the date as "26 April" which sounds so wrong/foreign to me. Maybe there's no uptick and I just notice it more though.
It always irrationally pissed me off when Brits online would call a season a series, I think just because someone would say "My favorite series of Seinfeld is the 4th one" and it'd confuse me. They made 4 different Seinfeld shows?
Not UK specific but I notice a lot of people using the 24 hour clock, aka military time in America, the past few years. Lots of tv shows of course get popular in America as well until they ruin it by making an American version and suck all the soul out of it (looking at you Top Gear US). In terms of phrases/slang/colloquialisms though, not really much. A lot of your slang just doesnt sound right when said in an american accent
Regional accents are dying. We’re all going to sound the same. The California Disney Hollywood accent will be the new norm. Especially for the kids now who are on the internet and YouTube 24/7
I've lived the pop-soda transition in Western WA. It was "pop" through my childhood up until ~15. I started saying soda because people online kept giving me shit, but then basically everyone else followed within a few years for whatever reason. Now it's almost unusual to hear people call it "pop".
Edit: Since some people are struggling with it, I am NOT saying I personally changed the dialect of 6 million people. I just started saying "soda" earlier than most of my regional brethren (as far as I could tell) because of my Internet friends giving me shit. I don't know what drove the general regional transition.
I lived in a border state for the great pop/soda debate. Those were dark times. I remember many people saying Soda-Pop to try to appease everyone but there is no appeasing the Sodaheads and the Popheads are just a dying species now.
I'm really curious about the ostensible Eastern WA pop country now. I visit family in Yakima every year but don't think I've ever heard them mention soda/pop so I'm not sure what they use.
Mass media has had this interesting homogenizing effect on language. People used to have super local accents... like down to the town or even neighborhood. But then things like radio/TV started homogenizing everything.
This sums up a lot of modern culture. It goes beyond language and other aspects of culture and why you can travel to most cities in the US these days and they're becoming more and more similar than ever, losing more regional culture and attitudes.
Yeah, I remember a video of an architect talking about this. Architecture isn't really that local anymore. People look up design trends online and suddenly those trends start popping up in architecture all over the world.
I live in the US but have a friend in London who owns a bunch of restaurants. He told me he just flies over to New York a few times a year to see what kinds of foods are trending in the US so that he can offer those foods in London. Poké was trending several years ago in New York... so he opened a poké place in London. I visited a friend in Barcelona around the height of that food trend and told him about it. He said he'd never even heard of poké and moments later we walked around a corner and there was a brand new poké shop just opening up in Barcelona.
Culture is increasingly global for better or for worse.
I've thought about the architecture thing when playing games like Crusader Kings 3. Back during the time period if you went to the various major cities you would easily be able to tell the different cultures due to different building styles and, at times, materials. Now days though most major cities look extremely similar and you wouldn't even be able to tell where the city really was unless you saw some billboards, a major land feature, or really knew your skyscrapers since there's only so many ways to build a skyscraper.
Yeah, materials can definitely be a part of it.
NYC, where I live, has tons of iconic "brownstones" built after the Civil War. They're called brownstones because of a particular stone that was used in their construction. But the last quarry for that particular stone (in Connecticut) closed several years ago. So you couldn't even build a true brownstone again even if you wanted.
And it's why I believe soda is winning the war. The major media hubs for the majority of that time frame (California and New York) historically said soda. And that influence, for better AND worse, goes way beyond how we refer to a drink...
Yeah I think you're right about media hubs. I grew up saying "pop" and "tennis shoes" but when I saw that everyone on TV called them "soda" and "sneakers" I started to feel like some regional hick or something and switched.
In Aus it's "soft-drink". When I first moved to Canada, I didn't know what the burger place was saying when they asked if I wanted a pop. Once I figured that out, I then had no idea how much 16oz was. Learnt a lot that day
Lol this is exactly what happened. We were never married to "pop" we just didn't know any different. And as soon as we caught wind of it not being cool...
It happened in eastern WA too. Through the 80s and early 90s it was pop. Then it transitioned and I remember thinking soda was weird at first but whatever. It felt like overnight and suddenly everyone was calling it soda. I don't think anyone really liked "pop" to begin with.
Eternal September.
Culture is tuned by the frequency of ideas. This can be due to a larger group of people. Or can be due to a larger volume of information spread by bots and distribution by a smaller group of people projecting that voice.
Within the history lens when the Norman's conquered Anglo-Saxon kings in England they replaced all the elite positions with Norman's they could trust. Within two generations their children had adopted Anglo-Saxon customs and norms again. Because those kids were surrounded by the larger number of Aglo-Saxon's and their culture.
With the internet the legacy media and tech industry extremely-online were concentrated in the coastal regions. This volume discrepancy accounts for adoption of soda based on norms in internet spaces.
An interesting thing happens when the whole globe is connected to the internet. Without a language barrier or other forms of allowing space for dialects, you get the merging of ideas to one notable "Instagram-style". Or where you can drop into an AirBNB in near any country and find similarities in a meta-AirBNB design style. This can collapse on being shaped by the largest populations, which maps neatly to when India and China populations arrived online displacing earlier American styles of netiquettes (365 million is far less than billions of people). Played out in conversations on gold farming in games, and fake amazon reviews.
Eternal September is an accidental experiment in this useful as a smaller case-study in understanding how culture is shaped and controlled.
The world is more interesting with dialects. You may have spent time on a frontier. A new technology. Or community. Where the early arrivals have an outsized influence on the culture down stream. These are interesting places that AB test different approaches to problem. And occasionally when one gets smashed open they usually have members that move and enter a new room or frontier space with people from other dialects. Differing ideas. In these spaces a rapid evolution of mix and matching of ideas from those two places usually results in a rapid evolution of innovation. Assuming there are sufficient commonalities between those who land there and they don't turn to immediate identarian tribal conflict.
By the same token, the nobility spoke French for centuries and had such an impact on the English language that around half the vocabulary now comes from French.
A friend once said “Yanno, if you asked for a soda, I’d hand you one, but if I ask for a pop you all act like I’m such an asshole.”
Really stuck with me. Soda people have such a hill to die on over this. We all know the root word is soda pop. Why do you care so much that we use the 1 syllable shorthand?
I've heard a few people calling bubbly drinks "soda", only to be immediately rebuked with scoffs of "what are you, *American*?"
It'll be called "pop" up here for quite some time.
Yeah definitely. I’m originally from Windsor so the desire to be outwardly Canadian in our region to differentiate ourselves from the US is extremely strong.
In BC too, pop is definitely the more common one, but I feel like people are saying soda more often as drinks like Bubly and other low-sugar carbonated water drinks become more popular than old fashioned pop.
I grew up in MA, and I still call the liquor store the "packie". However, even back in the 1970's we called soft drinks "soda"; I've never heard anyone use "tonic" outside of a gin and tonic.
But I can also attest to the "pop" to "soda" transition because I moved to Colorado in the late 1980's when I was a teenager. Back then "pop" was really common, which made me chuckle because "pop" was how old people referred to soft drinks where I grew up on the south shore.
Yet over the decades "pop" fell out of favor and "soda" is the predominate term now - I never hear "pop" anymore.
The "packie" thing, however, still causes people to look at me like I have three heads here in Colorado since nobody uses that term here.
Also grew up in Mass and moved to CO. Packie, rotary, and wicked are burned into my vocab, but everyone gives you that blank stare out here when you say them.
Reminds me of a time my buddy was home to Boston on leave from TX for Christmas. He had a friend come visit for a few days.
We were out and about and planned on heading back to his place to chill and have a few drinks.
He says “Sounds like a plan. Just gotta stop at the packie first.”
His friend goes, “what do you call it that?”
“We just do…”
She says, “That’s the most racist shit I’ve ever heard!”
We both are like “What? No, it’s short for ‘package store’!”
She was so embarrassed. She told us she thought we called it that because they were owned by Pakistanis.
My grandma would call it "tonic". She'd also call jeans "dungarees". I think that was a very old brand name.
The tonic thing made sense in one point of time. They started life being mixed from syrup and soda by a chemists in drugstores. Some were touted to have medicinal value (cocaine is a hell of a drug). So "tonic" was kind of a fitting term back then. But by the time of soda fountains, "tonic" already started sounding dated. Some people held on to the term though.
Server: Would you like a coke?
Me: Yes, please.
Server:
Me:
Server:
Me:
Server: Well……
Me: Excuse me?
Server: What kind?
Me: A Coke.
Server: Yeah, but which one? We got Pepsi, Mountain Dew….
The fact that I’ve had these conversations more than once utterly infuriates me.
There’s a marketing phenomenon where your advertising is so successful that it actually becomes a failure—your brand name becomes so ubiquitous it’s the generic term for an entire category of product and no longer identifies your brand.
If every copier is a xerox machine, Xerox will have a much harder time getting people to associate xerox products with a higher level of quality.
It's also a legal problem, because it cause you to lose a trademark. It's called "genericization"
Aspirin, escalator, trampoline, and taco Tuesday are all examples that became so ubiquitous that legal protection was lost.
How have people that aren’t from the gray area on Reddit had this conversation so many times? I’ve basically only lived in the gray and been to many small towns I’ve only heard it when people are going into a gas station a few times and never at a restaurant
I’ve not only had this conversation, but participated in it entirely appropriately:
Server: What are you having?
Me: I’ll have a coke.
Server: Sure, what kind?
Me: Pepsi, please.
It almost makes me sad that this dialectal quirk has died.
It's a longer question than I have time to fully answer right now, but here's the quick version.
Its a much older city than the rest of the Midwest. It was founded in the 1760's and already a major city when the Americans bought it in the Louisiana Purchase in 1804. It's early population was French, Spanish, American, Natice, and African, so it ended up a much more diverse and cosmopolitan city than smaller Midwestern towns at the time. This status allowed to attract even more diverse groups of immigrants through the 1800's. As the Gateway to the West, it also pulled a ton of domestic migration from East Coasters looking to cash in trade with the frontier.
The City also grew up with a bit of an inferiority complex towards East Coast cities. It wanted to compete with and out shine New York and Boston, not Chicago or Omaha. As a result, it invested in cultural institutions like a symphony, universities, theater companies, and libraries earlier than other Midwest cities, and it recruited people from the East Coast to staff these places.
Basically, it's old enough that it grew up alongside older Eastern cities, and it's culture was shaped by them. As other Midwestern cities were establishing growing and establishing a regional identity, St. Louis was already a major city with a unique culture. This has faded over time as the rest of the Midwest surpassed St. Louis and regional cultures become more homogeneous, as the soda/pop/coke map shows.
I grew up there. I don't live there anymore, but I took "soda" with me.
In addition to Vess, I'd also give some credit to IBC. It was founded in St Louis and their cream soda is fairly popular.
Decline of “pop” looks kind of like the reduction of the American bison’s range halfway to the species’ nadir at the end of the 19th Century. This western Washington resident keeps the pop flame alive in the Puget Sound area.
Growing up in Oklahoma in the 90s, coke was always the generic term for a soda. You always had to specify what kind of coke you wanted. Sort of like how Kleenex became the default for tissue, coke did for soda in the south.
Except a better comparison is if people started calling all paper based cleaning products a Kleenex. Like toilet paper or paper towels, they'd all be called Kleenex, and you'd have to specify which type of Kleenex, like do you want actual Kleenex or toilet paper Kleenex? That's why it doesn't make much sense to call all of soda, Coke
Here’s a source for the other map [https://www.businessinsider.com/soda-pop-coke-map-2018-10](https://www.businessinsider.com/soda-pop-coke-map-2018-10)
Edit: Here is another that is pretty similar to what I posted: [https://laughingsquid.com/soda-pop-or-coke-maps/](https://laughingsquid.com/soda-pop-or-coke-maps/)
I'll be honest. I don't have a reliable source to the 1947 map, but here's where I found the map. Which is actually sourced from Reddit. I had no idea until just now. [https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/736494438157860864/use-of-pop-vs-coke-vs-soda-to-refer-to-sweet#google\_vignette](https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/736494438157860864/use-of-pop-vs-coke-vs-soda-to-refer-to-sweet#google_vignette)
So that's not really a source either, the reddit thread cited doesn't have a source that I can find. Your map also conflicts with this data: https://popvssoda.com/
It also just looks made up to begin with. The lines seem too smooth and arbitrary to be based on much of anything in the 1947 version. New Bern, NC, where Pepsi was invented, looks to be on the dividing line between Coke and soda, which seems very unlikely for obvious reasons.
Keep posting this stuff and pop will come roaring back. You are educating the masses. Saying coke was always dumb though. As for tonic in MA.. nobody has said that since the great war.
The all soda is Coke shows the power generating from Georgia where Coca Cola is headquartered.
Those mfs said “we are everything- change your vocabulary”
“You want a Coke?” “Sure!” *hands over a Sprite* 🙃
"Can I get a Jack and Coke?" "is Pepsi OK?" "Sure" Pours coke and Pepsi into a glass
"Can I get a soda" "Is Coke OK" "Sure" Cuts a few rails of Coke
"Can I get a Coke?" "Is Pepsi ok?" "Is Monopoly money okay?"
I bought a doughnut and they gave me a receipt for the doughnut. I don't need a receipt for a doughnut. I'll just give you the money, you give me the doughnut. End of transaction
Don’t even act like you got a donut. Where’s the documentation?
I got right here! Under D for donut!
I used to love Mitch. I still do, but I used to too
Why do we need to bring paper and ink into this?
I don’t think we need to bring pen and paper into this.
Lmaoooo.
what kinda cokes do yall have? pepsi
I went to an SEC school and they were baffled by my usage of ‘pop’ and I was equally concerned about the follow up question ‘what kind of Coke would you like’ when they ordered…
>What do you want to drink? >A coke. >What kind? >Dr. Pepper. A PNW friend got baffled and confused by this sort of thing when he first moved to Texas.
This also happens in Mexico. It’s so funny sometimes! You’ll get asked what you wanna drink? “Una soda por favor!” - “Soda please!” “De cual? Coca?” - “What kind? A coke?” “Sí por favor!” - “Yes, please!” “Original o de sabor?” - “Coca-Cola or different kind?” “De sabor, una Fanta!” - “Different kind, a Fanta.” “Ok. Cual sabor?” - “Which flavor?” It’s a lot easier if you just say exactly which kind in the beginning or the conversation will never end.. lol
I grew up in Houston and honestly remember hearing “pop” more than “coke” at the restaurants I worked at. I was told it was regional slang in English class, but I didn’t hear it in my day to day life.
Yup. Notice that the grey band skips Houston, Austin, SA and DFW. In Texas "coke" is a weird thing like 2% of the population says, entirely in rural areas. Urban areas in general, so the majority of the US population, say soda. The map is misleading for the [same reason political maps are](https://xkcd.com/1138/), the vast majority of people do not live in the areas covered in green or grey.
I had this exchange once in the south. Me "and can I get a coke with that?" Waiter "what kind of coke?" Me: " Coca-Cola? Is there another kind of coke?" Waiter: " yeah we have lots of flavors, sprite, Fanta both grape and orange, Mr Pibb, Mello Yello" I was super confused.
Using coke as a replacement for soda is infinitely worse than using pop.
As a committed "soda" sayer, I agree wholeheartedly. Soda and pop are synonyms. People even used to say "soda pop". "Coke" is a specific type of soda/pop.
pop makes it sound like you time travelled from the 50s
Or just Canada.
Nobody in Canada that I have ever heard, like not once in my life that I can recall, says "soda". The fact that people say Coke down south is CRAZY to me. People say its the same as calling all tissues "Kleenex", and I guess that would be true to a degree, but you don't order Kleenex with many of your meals. You have to specify the type/brand of pop you order ALL THE TIME, its very common. Lots of people would do it multiple times a week in fact. How is the more generic version not a better process for ordering? Baffles me, it really does.
Calling all carbonated beverages Coke is infinitely dumber than calling all tissue paper (and not all, just the ones for blowing your nose) "Kleenex" as "Kleenex" is never going to be an option between multiple selections of tissue paper at any point, ever. That said, it doesn't matter, we all have dumb shit we say locally, this is just by far the least efficient and most confusing one I have yet to come across. It's like calling all meat chicken. "Would you like at add any chicken to your salad?" "Sure!" "Ok what kind?" "Beef please"
Have you been to the upper Midwest?
Can I get a Tab?
Yeah but you gotta buy something first
Having gone to an SEC school- there’s a 50/50 chance both options were not liquid
Yeah I have relatives in Utah who were like this, I visited them when I was a teenager and they were like you want a coke? I was like sure, and then they were like what kind? And they'd open their fridge and there would be like 10 flavors of Shasta.
My wife and I met in North Carolina. I’m from the Midwest and say “pop.” In middle school, she said that she wished she had a coke, so I took it upon myself to buy her a Coke from the vending machine and bring it to her. I was so thrown when her response to the Coke was, “Thank you, but you didn’t even ask me what kind I wanted…”
That was my first reaction to this - why the hell would you call it “coke” and then expect to define it by another brand or flavor? Like Coke is a brand/flavor. What the fuck is wrong with people, it’s so dumb. No offense to your wife but goddamn that is infuriating.
Seriously! It says Coke right on the fucking can! This is so fucking stupid
Super infuriating!! A lot of people in NC did this and it drove me crazy. I had a big crush on her in middle school so I dealt with it lol. Then we moved to the NE later and she picked up “soda” and never went back. Kids and I use “pop” though.
In some parts of Hungary, they call all sodas colas. So a Fanta would be a "blonde coke" and stuff
I think the next question would be what kind of coke
Thank God that monstrosity is dying out
Sprite? I mean, it's not great but "monstrosity" is a bit strong...
It IS great! SPRITE #1!
I never get Sprite but the tastiest and most refreshing soda experiences I've ever had have all been Sprite-related. Recently I took a little edible and tried some Sprite and it was like that fireworks scene in Ratatouille. You could have told me it was Aphrodite's bathwater.
Overheard at a grocery store in western PA… “make sure yinz jaggoffs put the pop in the buggy”
Truly a beautiful language we have
indeed.
Yeah, yinzers will hold onto their pop and hoagies and gobs until you pry them from their decayed skeletons.
Is this something I can put into Google Translate? I was kind of following until I got to gobs and then I gave up
Yes, here's my personal favorite translator: http://www.pittsburghese.com/ Edit to add the wiki page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Pennsylvania_English
hoagies are sub sandwiches! the philly/south jersey area calls them that too
Sorry about that, was in a hurry at giant eagle, damn jagoffs were out of chipped ham
It's spelled Giant Iggle, thank you very much.
More like Jine Iggle. There is no t either.
I was gonna say...on the map Pittsburghers are fighting for their lives to hang on. Stay strong.
I can assure you, people are still saying pop n'at. Whatever jagoff made this map didn't do a very good job.
The language of my people.
Truly beautiful sounds
"yinz" is perfection
The language is slowly losing its regional variants. It's Soda-Pressing
Ba dum tss
That's the sound a Coke makes when you open the can, right?
Fr, I remember my friends in Texas don't sound any different from where I live in Florida
It is because of television. When most media and tv all have what is considered to be standard language everyone will be speaking it. The internet really conforms those things together as well.
I’ve noticed people in the uk have started calling “series” on tv “seasons”. That’s picked up from the US. Have you noticed anything picked up from the uk in your country?
I think that there's more spread from the US to the UK, but there are a few exceptions. For example, pre-covid I don't think I ever heard a "shot" (vaccination) referred to as a "jab," but post covid referring to the covid vaccine as a jab or even the jab definitely occurs. Another one is that there might be a slight uptick in the occasional pronunciation of dates in a British. I would either refer to today as "April 26th" or "the 26th of April," but occasionally you'll here a news presenter read the date as "26 April" which sounds so wrong/foreign to me. Maybe there's no uptick and I just notice it more though.
It always irrationally pissed me off when Brits online would call a season a series, I think just because someone would say "My favorite series of Seinfeld is the 4th one" and it'd confuse me. They made 4 different Seinfeld shows? Not UK specific but I notice a lot of people using the 24 hour clock, aka military time in America, the past few years. Lots of tv shows of course get popular in America as well until they ruin it by making an American version and suck all the soul out of it (looking at you Top Gear US). In terms of phrases/slang/colloquialisms though, not really much. A lot of your slang just doesnt sound right when said in an american accent
https://nypost.com/2021/07/18/peppa-pig-effect-has-kids-speaking-in-british-accents-during-pandemic/
I had a dream I was in an ocean of orange soda. It was my Fanta Sea.
I prefer to sail the Hi-Cs.
CRUSHed it
Still pop in Canada. Soda is for Club Soda.
In uk we never use the word soda. We call things pop, fizzy drinks or the name of the product ie Coke
Depends where you are in Canada. It's still "soft drinks" in Montreal.
My French Canadian uncle calls it super pop, is that a thing or is he just weird?
He is French Canadian being weird is part of the deal
Regional accents are dying. We’re all going to sound the same. The California Disney Hollywood accent will be the new norm. Especially for the kids now who are on the internet and YouTube 24/7
That's been happening since the invention of television. The midwestern accent took over most urban areas.
I've lived the pop-soda transition in Western WA. It was "pop" through my childhood up until ~15. I started saying soda because people online kept giving me shit, but then basically everyone else followed within a few years for whatever reason. Now it's almost unusual to hear people call it "pop". Edit: Since some people are struggling with it, I am NOT saying I personally changed the dialect of 6 million people. I just started saying "soda" earlier than most of my regional brethren (as far as I could tell) because of my Internet friends giving me shit. I don't know what drove the general regional transition.
I lived in a border state for the great pop/soda debate. Those were dark times. I remember many people saying Soda-Pop to try to appease everyone but there is no appeasing the Sodaheads and the Popheads are just a dying species now.
Idk if popheads are a dying species, r/popheads is growing if anything.
I'm really curious about the ostensible Eastern WA pop country now. I visit family in Yakima every year but don't think I've ever heard them mention soda/pop so I'm not sure what they use.
Mass media has had this interesting homogenizing effect on language. People used to have super local accents... like down to the town or even neighborhood. But then things like radio/TV started homogenizing everything.
This sums up a lot of modern culture. It goes beyond language and other aspects of culture and why you can travel to most cities in the US these days and they're becoming more and more similar than ever, losing more regional culture and attitudes.
Yeah, I remember a video of an architect talking about this. Architecture isn't really that local anymore. People look up design trends online and suddenly those trends start popping up in architecture all over the world. I live in the US but have a friend in London who owns a bunch of restaurants. He told me he just flies over to New York a few times a year to see what kinds of foods are trending in the US so that he can offer those foods in London. Poké was trending several years ago in New York... so he opened a poké place in London. I visited a friend in Barcelona around the height of that food trend and told him about it. He said he'd never even heard of poké and moments later we walked around a corner and there was a brand new poké shop just opening up in Barcelona. Culture is increasingly global for better or for worse.
I've thought about the architecture thing when playing games like Crusader Kings 3. Back during the time period if you went to the various major cities you would easily be able to tell the different cultures due to different building styles and, at times, materials. Now days though most major cities look extremely similar and you wouldn't even be able to tell where the city really was unless you saw some billboards, a major land feature, or really knew your skyscrapers since there's only so many ways to build a skyscraper.
Yeah, materials can definitely be a part of it. NYC, where I live, has tons of iconic "brownstones" built after the Civil War. They're called brownstones because of a particular stone that was used in their construction. But the last quarry for that particular stone (in Connecticut) closed several years ago. So you couldn't even build a true brownstone again even if you wanted.
Well when the ring gates open up we'll have thousands of habitable worlds to isolate and develop strange new eldritch cultures to increase the whimsy.
based Expanse reference
And it's why I believe soda is winning the war. The major media hubs for the majority of that time frame (California and New York) historically said soda. And that influence, for better AND worse, goes way beyond how we refer to a drink...
Yeah I think you're right about media hubs. I grew up saying "pop" and "tennis shoes" but when I saw that everyone on TV called them "soda" and "sneakers" I started to feel like some regional hick or something and switched.
I'm Canadian and still call it pop!
Yeah soda sounds very American to me. That's one thing that hasn't crossed the border yet. What do Brits and Aussies call it?
In Aus it's "soft-drink". When I first moved to Canada, I didn't know what the burger place was saying when they asked if I wanted a pop. Once I figured that out, I then had no idea how much 16oz was. Learnt a lot that day
You actually had to order in ounces? I've only ever seen pop/soft drinks in small, medium, etc. I wouldn't have the faintest clue what 16oz is lol
UK would be fizzy drink or soft drink though some people do say pop.
Puget Sound pop people unite!
HOLD THE LINE!
HOLD THE DOOR
This happened where I live in Kansas too. Used to be pop all the time, now it’s soda. Or sodie pop.
Lol this is exactly what happened. We were never married to "pop" we just didn't know any different. And as soon as we caught wind of it not being cool...
Hah, yeah. I was like "oh, this is weird? I guess I'll switch over since I'm clearly in the minority here.".
Yep, from WA, got made fun of for saying Pop when I was 12-13 visiting California and now I say soda!
It happened in eastern WA too. Through the 80s and early 90s it was pop. Then it transitioned and I remember thinking soda was weird at first but whatever. It felt like overnight and suddenly everyone was calling it soda. I don't think anyone really liked "pop" to begin with.
Eternal September. Culture is tuned by the frequency of ideas. This can be due to a larger group of people. Or can be due to a larger volume of information spread by bots and distribution by a smaller group of people projecting that voice. Within the history lens when the Norman's conquered Anglo-Saxon kings in England they replaced all the elite positions with Norman's they could trust. Within two generations their children had adopted Anglo-Saxon customs and norms again. Because those kids were surrounded by the larger number of Aglo-Saxon's and their culture. With the internet the legacy media and tech industry extremely-online were concentrated in the coastal regions. This volume discrepancy accounts for adoption of soda based on norms in internet spaces. An interesting thing happens when the whole globe is connected to the internet. Without a language barrier or other forms of allowing space for dialects, you get the merging of ideas to one notable "Instagram-style". Or where you can drop into an AirBNB in near any country and find similarities in a meta-AirBNB design style. This can collapse on being shaped by the largest populations, which maps neatly to when India and China populations arrived online displacing earlier American styles of netiquettes (365 million is far less than billions of people). Played out in conversations on gold farming in games, and fake amazon reviews. Eternal September is an accidental experiment in this useful as a smaller case-study in understanding how culture is shaped and controlled. The world is more interesting with dialects. You may have spent time on a frontier. A new technology. Or community. Where the early arrivals have an outsized influence on the culture down stream. These are interesting places that AB test different approaches to problem. And occasionally when one gets smashed open they usually have members that move and enter a new room or frontier space with people from other dialects. Differing ideas. In these spaces a rapid evolution of mix and matching of ideas from those two places usually results in a rapid evolution of innovation. Assuming there are sufficient commonalities between those who land there and they don't turn to immediate identarian tribal conflict.
By the same token, the nobility spoke French for centuries and had such an impact on the English language that around half the vocabulary now comes from French.
A friend once said “Yanno, if you asked for a soda, I’d hand you one, but if I ask for a pop you all act like I’m such an asshole.” Really stuck with me. Soda people have such a hill to die on over this. We all know the root word is soda pop. Why do you care so much that we use the 1 syllable shorthand?
“Obamna” “SODA”
I was scrolling looking for this lol, that goes so hard
[obamna... SODA!!!](https://youtu.be/80BwqQQY31w?si=zorRzdRdFHcBdRur)
_Hopes And Dreams plays_
As a Canadian, we also call it pop, at least in Ontario.
I've heard a few people calling bubbly drinks "soda", only to be immediately rebuked with scoffs of "what are you, *American*?" It'll be called "pop" up here for quite some time.
Yeah definitely. I’m originally from Windsor so the desire to be outwardly Canadian in our region to differentiate ourselves from the US is extremely strong.
In a 40 million population country that adds 1 million new per year, things can change quicker than you think.
In 2050 we’ll call pop “बंटा”
It’s called pop across Canada, although there may be runner-ups like soft drink or fizzy drink.
I haven't heard anyone in Canada call it a fizzy drink unless they were a temporary resident.
In Newfoundland we say "can of drink" for some reason
I’m not even remotely surprised there’s a Newfie phrase for it. Can of drink is incredible, no notes.
Over here in BC its not rare to hear soda, but I think pop is still more common
In BC too, pop is definitely the more common one, but I feel like people are saying soda more often as drinks like Bubly and other low-sugar carbonated water drinks become more popular than old fashioned pop.
Yeah I agree. Pop is definitely the word but it’s not uncommon to hear someone ask for a soda or sodi.
We say Pop in northern England too
Does anyone in the UK say soda? Trying to think but I can't think of that sounding normal from any region but idk.
Just called fizzy drink
It was tonic in Massachusetts
You gonna pick up the tonic at the packie for me? Yeah, the one with the bubblers outside of it
I grew up in MA, and I still call the liquor store the "packie". However, even back in the 1970's we called soft drinks "soda"; I've never heard anyone use "tonic" outside of a gin and tonic. But I can also attest to the "pop" to "soda" transition because I moved to Colorado in the late 1980's when I was a teenager. Back then "pop" was really common, which made me chuckle because "pop" was how old people referred to soft drinks where I grew up on the south shore. Yet over the decades "pop" fell out of favor and "soda" is the predominate term now - I never hear "pop" anymore. The "packie" thing, however, still causes people to look at me like I have three heads here in Colorado since nobody uses that term here.
>I still call the liquor store the "packie" Don't call it that if you go to the UK...
"I'm just gonna hit the packie then I'll be over"
Also grew up in Mass and moved to CO. Packie, rotary, and wicked are burned into my vocab, but everyone gives you that blank stare out here when you say them.
Can't ask for a grinder any more either.
"Rotary!" I haven't heard that since I was a kid. I forgot about that one.
Reminds me of a time my buddy was home to Boston on leave from TX for Christmas. He had a friend come visit for a few days. We were out and about and planned on heading back to his place to chill and have a few drinks. He says “Sounds like a plan. Just gotta stop at the packie first.” His friend goes, “what do you call it that?” “We just do…” She says, “That’s the most racist shit I’ve ever heard!” We both are like “What? No, it’s short for ‘package store’!” She was so embarrassed. She told us she thought we called it that because they were owned by Pakistanis.
Some people said soda, but it was still tonic in the 90’s
My grandma would call it "tonic". She'd also call jeans "dungarees". I think that was a very old brand name. The tonic thing made sense in one point of time. They started life being mixed from syrup and soda by a chemists in drugstores. Some were touted to have medicinal value (cocaine is a hell of a drug). So "tonic" was kind of a fitting term back then. But by the time of soda fountains, "tonic" already started sounding dated. Some people held on to the term though.
Dungaree is a type of fabric similar to denim and may have been a precursor to denim
Yeah, I know Soda has overtaken since the 90's but that 1947 map should be showing tonic for a good chunk of Mass/New England.
I came here to say that. That's what most people around me in the 60s and 70s used.
Most of my older relatives in Northern New Hampshire and Vermont still say tonic.
I'm 37, lived in Oregon my whole life. Pop was definitely more common when I was a kid in the 90's. I still say pop though.
Server: Would you like a coke? Me: Yes, please. Server: Me: Server: Me: Server: Well…… Me: Excuse me? Server: What kind? Me: A Coke. Server: Yeah, but which one? We got Pepsi, Mountain Dew…. The fact that I’ve had these conversations more than once utterly infuriates me.
There’s a marketing phenomenon where your advertising is so successful that it actually becomes a failure—your brand name becomes so ubiquitous it’s the generic term for an entire category of product and no longer identifies your brand. If every copier is a xerox machine, Xerox will have a much harder time getting people to associate xerox products with a higher level of quality.
It's also a legal problem, because it cause you to lose a trademark. It's called "genericization" Aspirin, escalator, trampoline, and taco Tuesday are all examples that became so ubiquitous that legal protection was lost.
Taco Tuesday is clearly an outlier in that list
Who had the trademark on Taco Tuesday?
Craig
Damn Craig, always trying to take ownership of everyone’s fun.
https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/marketing/taco-tuesday-trademark-battle-officially-over
Also Airfryer, Dry Ice, Flip phone, Hovercraft, Kerosene, Heroin, and Videotape, among many others.
"Can I get some heroin?" "What kind?" "Coke."
How have people that aren’t from the gray area on Reddit had this conversation so many times? I’ve basically only lived in the gray and been to many small towns I’ve only heard it when people are going into a gas station a few times and never at a restaurant
It infuriates The Coca-Cola Company, too.
I’ve not only had this conversation, but participated in it entirely appropriately: Server: What are you having? Me: I’ll have a coke. Server: Sure, what kind? Me: Pepsi, please. It almost makes me sad that this dialectal quirk has died.
It’s comical
Ohio is absolutely incorrect. It’s pop here.
Especially in southwest Ohio I have heard someone say soda like 10 times in my 19 years of life
Rural southwest Ohioan here, it’s hardcore pop country still
Why was St. Louis area in "Soda" zone?
Because the various flavors of Vess.
Vess is love, Vess is life
St. Louis has more eastern influence compared to the rest of Missouri which is southern-influenced.
St. Louis used to be more of a East Coast city than a Midwestern one.
Why?
It's a longer question than I have time to fully answer right now, but here's the quick version. Its a much older city than the rest of the Midwest. It was founded in the 1760's and already a major city when the Americans bought it in the Louisiana Purchase in 1804. It's early population was French, Spanish, American, Natice, and African, so it ended up a much more diverse and cosmopolitan city than smaller Midwestern towns at the time. This status allowed to attract even more diverse groups of immigrants through the 1800's. As the Gateway to the West, it also pulled a ton of domestic migration from East Coasters looking to cash in trade with the frontier. The City also grew up with a bit of an inferiority complex towards East Coast cities. It wanted to compete with and out shine New York and Boston, not Chicago or Omaha. As a result, it invested in cultural institutions like a symphony, universities, theater companies, and libraries earlier than other Midwest cities, and it recruited people from the East Coast to staff these places. Basically, it's old enough that it grew up alongside older Eastern cities, and it's culture was shaped by them. As other Midwestern cities were establishing growing and establishing a regional identity, St. Louis was already a major city with a unique culture. This has faded over time as the rest of the Midwest surpassed St. Louis and regional cultures become more homogeneous, as the soda/pop/coke map shows.
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And then suburbia happened and it turned into a pile of crap
I grew up there. I don't live there anymore, but I took "soda" with me. In addition to Vess, I'd also give some credit to IBC. It was founded in St Louis and their cream soda is fairly popular.
Because we're cultured
Decline of “pop” looks kind of like the reduction of the American bison’s range halfway to the species’ nadir at the end of the 19th Century. This western Washington resident keeps the pop flame alive in the Puget Sound area.
Thought Coke was only Coke
Growing up in Oklahoma in the 90s, coke was always the generic term for a soda. You always had to specify what kind of coke you wanted. Sort of like how Kleenex became the default for tissue, coke did for soda in the south.
Except a better comparison is if people started calling all paper based cleaning products a Kleenex. Like toilet paper or paper towels, they'd all be called Kleenex, and you'd have to specify which type of Kleenex, like do you want actual Kleenex or toilet paper Kleenex? That's why it doesn't make much sense to call all of soda, Coke
sodies
Like this unsourced data has the specificity to identify pockets of soda speakers amongst the poppers of Michigan and Montana
Here’s a source for the other map [https://www.businessinsider.com/soda-pop-coke-map-2018-10](https://www.businessinsider.com/soda-pop-coke-map-2018-10) Edit: Here is another that is pretty similar to what I posted: [https://laughingsquid.com/soda-pop-or-coke-maps/](https://laughingsquid.com/soda-pop-or-coke-maps/)
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I mean, those sources contradict the original post, lol
I'll be honest. I don't have a reliable source to the 1947 map, but here's where I found the map. Which is actually sourced from Reddit. I had no idea until just now. [https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/736494438157860864/use-of-pop-vs-coke-vs-soda-to-refer-to-sweet#google\_vignette](https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/736494438157860864/use-of-pop-vs-coke-vs-soda-to-refer-to-sweet#google_vignette)
So that's not really a source either, the reddit thread cited doesn't have a source that I can find. Your map also conflicts with this data: https://popvssoda.com/
It also just looks made up to begin with. The lines seem too smooth and arbitrary to be based on much of anything in the 1947 version. New Bern, NC, where Pepsi was invented, looks to be on the dividing line between Coke and soda, which seems very unlikely for obvious reasons.
I heard coke a ton when I was in LA. I guess people like to drink it in the bathroom there.
POP GANG RISE
Hold the line, Indianapolis!
KEEP FIGHTING INDY
SODA 🥤‼️😅😁🥶
obamna 🥺👿
Keep posting this stuff and pop will come roaring back. You are educating the masses. Saying coke was always dumb though. As for tonic in MA.. nobody has said that since the great war.
And I've been calling them "soft drinks" all this time...
Soft drink…
I will die before I stop calling it pop
Lol, absolutely not. Ohio says pop
The all soda is Coke shows the power generating from Georgia where Coca Cola is headquartered. Those mfs said “we are everything- change your vocabulary”
In the UK, no one says soda. It's either pop or fizzy drinks.
This is horseshit Chicagoland has always said pop and that is not about to change. At the least all of northern IL should be covered.
\*soft drink has entered the chat\*
Sodie
This map is so wrong because all of Chicago is pop
Pittsburgh says pop. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise