Stupid shit like this hits hard to some folks in the south. I have family members are pissed how "everything is changing", so much in fact that this very thing caused a disturbance at a local college pub. Last year, one of my dumbass family members was thrown out for being rude. When I asked him what happened he said...
" That god damn Yankee girl wanted to know if I wanted a fucking pop. What the fuck is a pop? So I asked her. She said something like a soda or whatever and I told her, it's a fucking coke and she needs to go back to fucking Chicago and get fucked. Don't bring your stupid shit down here."
Even more f'd up, is he would have ordered a Sprite.
While my own similar rant would have been only meant in play, this is how I feel about both o' y'all. It's a fucking soda. Gonna just go all the way and call sweet tea a coke too?
I agree, but I also don't go around saying "cellophane tape" or "photocopy", and instead tend to use "scotch tape" and "xerox". Lots of other people do too. I know that's wrong too, but it at least partially explains the whole "coke" thing.
Florida here. I don't say Coke for all soda just for a dark cola. But Coke is just the first brand I think of/want when it comes to Soda. Like the most ubiquitous.
If I want a Root Beer I'm gonna ask for that. But I'd never fucking say Pop.
Florida here, I say Coke for standard cola style soda and will use it to reference soda in a general manner if discussing with someone obviously from the South. I use soda as well.
My wife grew up with pop and Pepsi as her regional standards. I make sure to reinforce soda and Coke as the correct standards since I'm not insane. ;)
Yes, because there's no real difference between Kleenex and other brands of tissues. There's a huge difference between a coke and a sprite for instance.
In reasonably confident that this is how people ask for a cola, not for any soda pop. The default soda in America is a cola, which we have the two primary brands (coke and Pepsi) and all the small time competitors. No one says ‘I’ll have a coke’ when they want a sprite.
That explains my confusion on why I always got told that people in the south call it all coke, but when growing up, I always heard just called soda; I grew up in NC, which is considered a southern state, but appears to have been completely taken over by the soda side at this point.
These are always so weird to me. I grew up in the rural south, and I’ve never once heard Coke used to describe soft drinks generically. In my experience when someone asks for a “coke” they specifically mean Coca Cola and would be pissed if they got something else.
If you go to Georgia, ‘coke’ is whichever cola they have. At least that’s been my experience when visiting family down there. 99% of the time you get Coca Cola, but that 1% is a kick in the nuts.
Had the same experience when I lived in east Texas and visited rural Louisiana. But it wasn’t that way when I lived in Virginia. Coke meant Coca Cola, and if you asked for coke and they had Pepsi, they’d ask if Pepsi was ok.
I like how it has really vague boundaries that are obviously approximate but then it pretends to do precise gerrymandering-type carveouts in the second map
I agree! Pop is the correct term to use if you want to be correct at the expense of being cringe. Cool kids have always said soda. You nerds still can't distinguish between a float, a malt, a shake, and a soda! I can, so I have no need of this "pop".
I’ve heard that if you order a “Coke” in the area that says “Coke”, they’ll just give you a random soda and you have to drink it no matter what it is. That just seems plain wrong to me.
I really want coke to be more common as referring to soda pop on general because I want to see Coca Cola freak out as they lose the trademark to genericization.
I wonder why calling it pop made it only to far western NY and then soda in the rest of Upstate? There was a lot of trade between Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, especially with the advent of the Erie Canal.