We Can't Stop Here! This Is Pop Country!

We long ago accepted that when we left Wisconsin -- even the Milwaukee area -- the word "bubbler" would drop from our vocabulary. Little Miss Seattlest won't use it, and will at best find it a quaint relic of her father's birthstate.

What we didn't realize before settling in Seattle, though, is that it's "pop" territory. We grew up saying "soda," or maybe "soda pop." But "pop"? When we were young, we found it disconcerting when people from other states would use the word. "It's soda!" our brains would say, while our polite mouths held our polite tongues.

We were reminded of this when BoingBoing (re)linked to popvssoda.com, a site that tracks dialectical use of pop, soda, coke, and other soft-drink-related language across the country. We Sconnies? The last outpost of soda civilization before the California coast, it seems.

So far, Little Miss Seattlest says "soda." (When we drink it -- so far as she's concerned, Diet Dr Pepper is a grownup drink.) But of course, for now, we're her main peers. Will she succumb to peer pressure and morph into a pop person? Time will tell.

In the meantime, we can only sympathize with those poor bastards who refer to soda or pop as "tonic."

Washington: blue state, and pop state.

Contact the author of this article or email tips@seattlest.com with further questions, comments or tips.

By James in Arts & Events on May 14, 2007 1:48 PM

Comments [rss]

jpv206

Oh, by the way...

The reason I propose a word experiment instead of just running up to a "pop" person and say "Do you say 'pop' because it's pre-mixed?" is because people's language behavior often reflects semantic distinctions even if they can't articulate them.

For example, most native English speakers couldn't explain to you the difference between the words "many" and "much." But they don't get them mixed up, either.

******

ice cream soda, *ice cream pop

(still not interchangeable).

jpv206

MvB's assertion is that "soda" and "pop" are used interchangeably in common usage in Seattle. S/he's right, people are from all over the country, and bring their lexical habits with them to Seattle. Among them, "soda" is definitely the prestige variant.

However, his/her skepticism regarding whether pre-mixed/not pre-mixed distinction is really about the people who say "pop." Do the people who natively say "pop" maintain a pre-mixed/not premixed distinction?

Here's the test:

can of soda, can of pop

cold soda, cold pop

soda machine*, pop machine

Italian soda, *Italian pop

old fashioned soda fountain, *old fashioned pop fountain

soda water, *pop water

Please feel free to add your own items. As a native "pop" speaker, the ones with asterisks sound horrible to me, but certainly MvB would accuse me of being "ad hoc" if I reported my own usage. The test is to see if the "pop" really people do the pre-mixed distinction, or if they're really interchangeable.

("Can of soda", "ice-cold soda" don't sound bad to me, but as a native "pop" person I would never say them. "Soda machine" to me sounds very unnatural).

So add your own soda vs. pop distinctions, and do it on a few of your "pop" friends. Hell, do it on your "soda" friends as well, see what you get. Do it to a hundred people, and it's a dialectology study, write a paper....

*****

Extra credit: find out what the "pop" people call the fountain drinks at 7/11 or McDonalds, the ones that are separate tanks of syrup and soda(!) but get mixed automatically and come out of the spout.

Does that count as pre-mixed (because it's automatic) or not?

James Callan

I forgot to quote the stats: in King County, pop beats soda 936 to 230. So we're a minority, but not as much as the 39 people who say coke.

Duncan

I had exactly the same experience, except I was in LA for four years. No one could understand me for the first year and a half.

COMTE

I'm a PNW native, and I've always said "soda", rarely, "soda pop", but never just "pop" by itself.

I would also point out, for the sake of fairness, that my distant relatives were from Wisconsin, but that was three generations ago, so I can't imagine the regionalism would have been passed down from that far back.

Morfydd

I grew up here saying "pop". When I went to college in Maryland no one understood that so I switched to "soda". When I moved back I just stuck with "soda" because everyone understands it, even if they themselves say "pop".

MvB

Ha! This is why people don't listen to linguists right here: ad hoc extrapolations and category mistakes. "We" here in Seattle use soda and pop interchangeably to refer to the stuff in cans or bottles or the fountain drinks at McDonalds. While it's true that Italian sodas are called sodas, common usage -- if it ever did -- now does not slice so finely.

jpv206

James, James, James...

You are so wrong. I don't mask my disdain.

Trotter

I think the linguist has something there.

Of course, nobody will ever know it because only the French care about Linguistics.

The point is, we should, as a Nation, alter all references to "flavored, carbonated beverage to be used in moderation to prevent tooth decay and gastric issues"

James Callan

It's not the lingustics degree. It's the poorly masked disdain for those you perceive as intellectual inferiors.

jpv206

Yawn.

We say "soda" here in Seattle when it is mixed. That's how you get an Italian soda, and a soda fountain.

However, if the drink comes pre-mixed (i.e., in a can or a bottle) then we call it a pop. Can of pop.

Sigh. I know nobody is going to listen to me. Nobody listens to linguists.