Soft drinks in America

[Deleted]

A lot of non-Americans do not understand how many regionalisms there are in the language in the United States.

Here is just one example or the generic name for a carbonated beverage in America.

(Click on the map to enlarge it.)

[Deleted]

Look at Alaska! Must be because of people from all over US settling there. For me,will always be soda. I'll go along with other colloquialisms but not this one. Plus,I don't drink soda.

[gringalais]

Very interesting. It's soda for me too. The weirdest to me is calling any soda Coke. I don't remember ever hearing that, but then the states that say that are probably where I have spent the least time.

There are variations in South America too. Here in Chile they say "bebida" but I have been in other countries where it is "gaseosa" and I'm sure there are more I can't remember right now.

[Deleted]

I'm from the Coke zone, but that term was only used for cola beverages anyway. But if you ordered a Coke and received a Pepsi or a Royal Crown, that was considered normal.

The generic term for the colorless stuff was 7-Up even if it was Sprite.

[Kimby]

I grew up in the pop zone around Madison Wisconsin, just across the line from the soda zone. People who call pop "coke" whether it's brown or not, are just nuts.

[Kimby]

What's the word for the public plumbing fixture that dispenses drinking water? Do you have a map for that, K2?

[spaman]

Here, on Long Island, it is soda. Coke is for Coca Cola.

[bixaorellana]

When we were little -- 7 and 5 -- my brother and I were taken to visit my dad's aunt and uncle outside of Boston. Aunt Kate repeatedly offered us tonic, and we repeatedly declined, politely saying, "We've already combed our hair." What chagrin when we found we'd been turning down pop.

[nutraxfornerves]

Apr 24, 2009 17:59:42 GMT Kimby said:

What's the word for the public plumbing fixture that dispenses drinking water? Do you have a map for that, K2?

Try the Harvard Dialect Survey.

You want "What do you call the thing from which you might drink water in a school?"

[bixaorellana]

Ha ~~ I opened up the main page of the forum a few minutes ago and saw the thread "pleasant light pop" showing and automatically thought, "Huh? I thought there was already a thread about soft drinks going!"

Gringalais, soft drinks here are "refrescos".

[Kimby]

May 30, 2009 19:17:31 GMT nutraxfornerves said:

Apr 24, 2009 17:59:42 GMT Kimby said:

What's the word for the public plumbing fixture that dispenses drinking water? Do you have a map for that, K2?

Try the Harvard Dialect Survey.

You want "What do you call the thing from which you might drink water in a school?"

I know the answer without looking. I grew up in the land of the "bubbler"

[Deleted]

It was always a water fountain to me.

[bixaorellana]

It is a water fountain.

I'd like to know how the questions were phrased to create that soft drink map. I've lived in many of the places the map claims that people say "coke" generically for soft drink, & it just ain't so.

[nutraxfornerves]

The Harvard survey worded the question like this:
What is your generic term for a sweetened carbonated beverage?
a. soda
b. pop
c. coke
d. tonic
e. soft drink
f. lemonade
g. cocola
h. fizzy drink
i. dope
j. other

One problem with the survey was that it was done online and is not necessarily statistically valid. If you look at the maps, you'll see not much between the Midwest and California. That's because they didn't get a significant amount of responses from the mountain states. They also did not collect information on where people grew up, as opposed to where they lived, which would reflect some uses.

When I was a kid, growing up in California, we always used "coke" generically, but I rarely hear it now.

[Deleted]

I remember in Mississippi hearing 'Coke' used generically, but it was not universal.

[Kimby]

After "bubbler", drinking fountain - not water fountain - would have been the second most often heard in my experience.

[dahuffy]

Jun 1, 2009 4:27:27 GMT kerouac2 said:

It was always a water fountain to me.

Water/Drinking Fountain. I was Minnesota born and raised.

[Deleted]

On some other travel site the other day, somebody was reporting about taking a tour where they sampled something like 24 varieties of Coke. When I read the details, it wasn't Coke at all but a bunch of sodas.

[dahuffy]

They have a place at Disney World where you can taste many different varieties of soda made by the Coca Cola company. I advise you to saty away from the "Beverly" it tastes like sweat!

[bixaorellana]

Uhhhhhhhhhh ~~ Dahuffy, you know what the obvious question to ask here is, don't you?
;D

[Deleted]

I went to the Coca Cola museum in Atlanta, and they had fountains for testing every single product made by Coca Cola in the world. I think that most people walked out of that room nauseous.

[joanne28]

I grew up saying "soft drink" and still do. My husband says "pop" because from the age of 10 on he lived in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) and that's what people say.

[Deleted]

When I went to northern Québec, I had to translate certain menu items from French to English and back again to figure out what they were talking about. "Roti" for toast was one thing, and of course "hambourgeois," but what really got me was "liqueurs douces" for soft drinks.

[livaco]

How interesting! I grew up and am living in a "soda" enclave surrounded by "pop" drinkers.

And kimby, I am smack in the middle of the "bubbler" part of the country. At school where I teach I can tell the teachers who are not from the Milwaukee area when they refer to the "drinking fountain". The kids usually set them straight.

Oddly, my brother has ended up living on the East Coast right in the other part of the country that says "bubbler". He might be forgiven for thinking the whole USA uses the term, but it's only the two small areas.

In the UK, they call the 7up/Sprite kind of soda "lemonade". I never could get used to that.

[bixaorellana]

Yikes on that UK word for 7up. What are they thinking?

One of the interesting things about Livaco's post is that it points up something many people may not realize. That is that somehow the midwestern part of the US has been relegated to the status of something generic and boring. Nothing could be further from the truth. For one thing, as you move through the midwest you're moving through parts of the American history of immigration and settlement and evidence of that is to be found everywhere, some of it quite localized.

I have a friend here who is in his early 70s and from Milwaukee. It's fun to listen to him talk about all the "Germanisms" still prevalent there in his childhood.

[Deleted]

In the British Isles, lemon-lime soda has always been called lemonade, perhaps as a corruption of the French name for it, limonade.

In both France and the British Isles, the term for what the Americans (and I suppose Canadians) call lemonade is citronade.

[dahuffy]

Jul 12, 2010 17:30:33 GMT bixaorellana said:

Uhhhhhhhhhh ~~ Dahuffy, you know what the obvious question to ask here is, don't you?
;D

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to ask that question!