Gene Expression

what's going on around St. Louis and Milwaukee?

Lots and lots of Germans, who had a largely separate and distinct, German-language culture up until US entry into WWI. I don't know if that explains the preference for "soda" (Cincinnati, after all, is a "pop" town, and had the same kind of thriving German culture), but it does account for all kinds of regional linguistic quirks.

Posted by: HP | June 15, 2008 8:40 PM

The most interesting part to me is the confetti around mid-Atlantic Appalachia...

Posted by: dietcoupon | June 15, 2008 9:31 PM

In Colombia I heard "gasioso". In Venezuela the word was "refresca".

Posted by: Jim Thomerson | June 15, 2008 10:01 PM

The most interesting part to me is the confetti around mid-Atlantic Appalachia...

interesting how eastern kentucky is with west virgina. i know eastern kentucky and tennessee had unionist sentiment in the predominantly anti-union south....

Posted by: razib | June 15, 2008 10:23 PM

Growing up in central and southern California, I never heard it referred to as anything but "soda pop."

Posted by: themadlolscientist | June 16, 2008 12:59 AM

Even with the few data point, I am still interested in how pop seems to rule in Canada, too.

Posted by: Christopher | June 16, 2008 1:47 AM

In NZ it's fizzy drink or lolly water...

Interesting how pop/coke lines up with north/south except in the NE and SW

Posted by: wazza | June 16, 2008 6:17 AM

Growing up in central and southern California, I never heard it referred to as anything but "soda pop."
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I grew up in the SF Bay Area and went to school in Los Angeles. Soda pop is how I generally heard it as well. If shortened though, as the map suggests, it was usually to soda.

Posted by: ponderingfool | June 16, 2008 7:55 AM

I was raised in and currently live in central NY (Utica). It was always "soda". "Pop" was considered to be a western NY thing. The dividing line is pretty obvious to me on the map (between Syracuse and Rochester). My wife grew up in western NY along Lake Ontario, closer to Buffalo than Rochester, and "pop" was the term to use.

Posted by: JimFiore | June 16, 2008 9:32 AM

Perhaps there is a connection to the early regional brands of soft-drinks. Prior to the national domination of Coke and Pepsi, small regional brands would have been available. For most people who had never heard of a carbonated drink these early brands would have influenced their choice of names. The area around St. Louis (or Milwaukee) could represent the distribution area of a popular brand that referred to itself as "something" soda. Thus the soda name became common. If one brand was successful then others would have copied the name to attract buyers. This does not explain the initial choice of name and may be contradictory with the other data. It would take finding out the old brand names and mapping their regions to see if it correlates with this map.

Posted by: Ben | June 16, 2008 11:05 AM

That lone island of yellow in Iowa seems to be the county for the University of Iowa, so I'm guessing it's a combination of out of state transplants and an effort by college educated folks to avoid using vocabulary they perceive as rustic (an effort I was instinctively drawn to even grade school while growing up in the state). Maybe something similar is going on with the other midwest patches of soda, colleges or urban areas drawing people from out of state, and the college and urban populations looking down their nose at their rural neighbors.

Posted by: iowa-rasied | June 16, 2008 12:55 PM

I wonder how this map would correlate with an overlay of other regional variances, like which syllable to stress in the word "insurance." In some areas people say "in-SUR-ance" and in others they say "IN-sur-ance" (with sur-ance in that instance usually being run together into one syllable so that it sounds more like "IN-shurnz"). Looking at this Coke/Pop/Soda map my guess is that people who say coke or pop would also (most likely) say "IN-sur-ance" while people who say soda or other would say "in-SUR-ance."

Posted by: Gollum | June 16, 2008 1:40 PM

Interesting how pop/coke lines up with north/south except in the NE and SW

as if the southern half of the country were culturally or linguistically homogenous. the southwest isn't "the south" AT ALL. ask anyone who knows anything about the war of northern agression.

my hypothesis for all that red in my neck of the woods (no pun intended): perhaps our population, a disproportionate percentage of which is rural, impoverished, uneducated, or all three, is easier to "brand" than urban, solvent, or educated sectors.

or, you could argue that coke was first launched in the south (georgia) and mass-packaged in the south (mississippi), and so it's comfortable and familiar to us scotch-irish-descended territorial types.

OR, you could argue that, with our lazy southern tongues, "coke" is easier than the plosive "pop" or disyllabic "soda."

what i think is interesting is the tiny patch of bright, bright green in texas. i'm pretty sure that's houston.

Posted by: tevebaugh | June 16, 2008 7:02 PM

St. Louis was historically an Eastern "colony" with lots of ties to the Northeast and less to the rest of the Midwest. The upper class sent their children to Ivy League schools and affected a "Connecticut/New York/Philadelphia" sort of style.

Posted by: Flip | June 17, 2008 7:33 AM

Razib, interesting post! I often wonder about the soda/pop thing myself. If German cultural influences had something to do with this, though, I'd expect words like 'fizzwasser' or at least 'spritzer' to be more common in this context. (I agree, though, that German linguistic-cultural influences on American (but especially Midwestern) culture are deep, pervasive, and largely underappreciated.)

Fitzwater and Spitzer, on the other hand, are actual German-American (Jewish?) names. And Sodawaterwalla is a real Parsi name.

Posted by: chachaji | June 21, 2008 9:04 AM