Just happened upon this while aimlessly surfing, which reminded me of college, in Western Pennsylvania, a stronghold of the absurd and offensive practice of calling soda “pop.”
First, problems with the data the map represents:
1. It’s based on 120,000-some responses in a nation of 300-plus million.
2. It’s by county but not population; the “pro-soda” (read: sane) northeast corridor is small geographically but includes New York, Philadelphia and Boston.
3. The chart gives no indication that the research was done in a way that attempted to allow for population demographics (i.e., what if 90 percent of the respondents were college students?). Such allowances go without saying in sophisticated professional polling, and even so such polling is about as accurate as peeing in a tornado, so how much stock are you gonna place in this?
4 . I refuse to believe anyone is addled enough to refer to root beer or Seven-up as “coke.”
Anyway, my college was dominated by the pop crowd, by which you can presume it did not have Ivy League-level admissions requirements. One roommate of mine advanced as evidence of pop’s hegemony the term “soda pop,” in which (his theory went) pop was grammatically the noun and soda therefore merely an adjective.
At the time my answer was little more than screaming into a pillow. But a day later this guy started in again, at a party, overserved, with a girl we were sort of competing for standing between us.
Now I was ready.
“Inside this,” I said, pretending to hold up a Coke can,” is a mixture of chemicals that is called soda. A cola-flavored can of soda is exactly, objectively, inarguably what this is, in the same way that that’s a chair and that’s a sock.
“You are within your rights in calling this ‘pop’ in the same way that you’re within your rights in wearing a leisure suit or nylon stretch pants; you are utterly free, in Amercia, to be a dumb-ass.
“But by calling a sock a sock sweet potato, you haven’t created an argument that the word sock can be an adjective when referring to a sock. You have created an argument for your removal - ideally while straitjacketed - from the mainstream.”
I may have cleaned the language up somewhat.
You can imagine how impressed the girl was with all this. Didn’t care. Sometimes you have to stand up for what’s right.
