What'll Ya Have?

One of the things that I learned when I went up to the Great Gray North for school was that people spoke differently than I was used to. Not just a matter of accents, but different words.

Among them were different words for a generic carbonated beverage. Even though "Coke" is a shortened form of "Coca-Cola" and is itself a registered trademark for that company, a lot of people used it to refer to any carbonated beverage that wasn't Sprite, Mountain Dew or Seven-Up. "I'll have a Coke," they say, and when the person offering the drink says "Well, I've got RC," the response is, "That'll be fine."

Other words are "pop" and "soda." A guy created an internet survey to see which words were most often used in what parts of the country. Since it's a reader-response survey, it's not necessarily a very accurate sample but is probably good enough to get a rough idea.

The smaller map breaks down the responses to the survey by county; click on it to get more detail. You can see that the word "pop" prevails in the northern and northwestern parts of the country, while the word "coke" is used more in the southern. "Soda" is the primary word at home according to people in the New England and the Southwest, as well as a curious outlying area around St. Louis.

Well, I've gone and made myself thirsty, so I'm headed out to get a diet coke. Or, since that's the actual name of what I'm going to have, I guess I should say Diet Coke.

One neat side note: The county-by county map was prepared by two folks right here in Oklahoma, who work at East Central University in Ada. Talk about a real-world application of knowledge!