Pop Quiz

Outside the fevered headlines of the moment there's this curious map that traces the regions of the US where people typically refer to soft drinks as soda, pop or coke. (It's a little hard to tell but according to the key, the "pop" areas are in blue, the "coke" regions in green.)

It's fascinating to me because of where the borders lie.  I grew up calling it "pop," and my western Pennsylvania hometown just ducks into the blue area.  Not too many miles to our east, it's soda (or soda-ish.)  I grew up in what the broadcast media called "the tri-state area," one of many to be sure, but in this case we were a relative few miles from Ohio and West Virginia.  So culturally we had crosscurrents of East, Midwest and South--or at least Appalachian South--as well as influences from the major immigrant countries.  In this case apparently we were more Midwestern.

Which is additionally interesting as I went to college in Illinois, ostensibly the Midwest, but it was in Galesburg, not far from the Mississippi border with Iowa, upriver from Missouri.  According to the map, there's a big red splotch of soda speakers in southern Illinois--Galesburg is either in it or in the pinkish zone of its borders.

Now I recall regional differences there that caught me by surprise--coffee taken black but with sugar (it was either milk and sugar or black at home), salads served before meals rather than after, plus exotic cuisine such as patty melts, pork tenderloin sandwiches and hash brown potatoes.  Differences in language too, though the one that comes to mind is a peculiar use of the word "pimp" as a verb meaning to prank.  But even though I probably heard soda spoken there (we had classmates from Darien and Long Island) mostly it was still pop.

That could be because the plurality if not absolute majority of Knox College students in those days were from "Chicagoland"--Chicago and its many and varied suburbs.  A comment in response to this map in the Washington Post affirms that Chicagoland spoke pop.  

Interesting to see that soda flies over flyoverland to reestablish itself in the West, most definitely in my new state of California, where soda (or the very minority "soft drink") reigns supreme.  Actually I may have first heard it called soda when visiting my cousins in Maryland as a child, and I have vague recollections of hearing the the generic "coke" somewhere.  But I tend to associate soda with places where I've been as ostensibly a grown-up.  In fact, I thought it was a difference not of place but of time: of age, or of the times.

 Before I saw this map,  I didn't see it as a regional difference.   "Pop" is redolent of childhood in the 50s, of the last day of school when the bottling plant next door gave it away, although you had to be quick to get a root beer or else you'd be stuck with orange.  Same with big summer family events--company picnics, wedding receptions-- where the ice chests soon held only something tasteless we did call soda.  Or later the Verners ginger ale I looked for in the coolers of the neighborhood stores on my paper route.  Or before that the flavors of pop-sicles.  A soda however was something with ice cream you got at the drug store soda fountain, though if you had that much money to spend you'd more likely choose a sundae or a milkshake, or--if you had another dime--a banana split.

I'd pretty much forgotten the word from college, and recollect it mostly in context of a letter to the editor in the college newspaper written by the boyfriend and later husband of a girl I knew, complaining of strangers pimping them by throwing "pop cans" into the darkened dorm lounge where they were making out.