Category Archives: Language

Soda or Pop?

Dialects, , ,

Both sets of my grandparents were from northeast Arkansas. My mother’s parents were from Randolph County, and my father’s parents were from Lawrence County, but they were probably no more than 10 miles apart, as the crow flies.

My mother’s parents always served Cokes if they were serving carbonated beverages, which wasn’t really that often. It was always Coca-Cola because, well, things went better with Coke, as the jingle went.

The first time I remember being offered a soft drink at my dad’s parents house, which again, wasn’t that often, it was a pop. It was also a Pepsi-Cola. I couldn’t read yet, but I knew my alphabet, and Pepsi started with a “p.” So, I probably went around for a year or two thinking that Coke was Coca-Cola (as is the case legally), and that pop was Pepsi.

At some point, I heard someone refer to Pepsi generically as Coke. In fact, I think I ordered a Coke and was served what I thought was a Pop instead. At least no one tried tinkering with my Coke floats — I would not have been amused to have gotten a Pepsi float instead.

Now, if you were to drill down on the handy-dandy map of the Pop vs Soda page, you would see that Lawrence County, Arkansas, is about as much into soda country as Arkansas gets.In fact, I had a difficult time understanding why the dialect why the dialect in the Greater Imboden, Arkansas, area varied so much for what turned out to be the same thing. I then learned that my dad’s parents lived in the Chicago area during the war, and two of their daughters and their kids still lived up there at the time. (Actually, it was Aurora, in Kane County, Illinois, if you must know, but this was long before Wayne’s World made Aurora such a hip place.)

At some point, I got used to calling it soda, and then I moved to Chicago. Apparently the whole Great Lakes runs on pop! They even have pop machines. I went to Minneapolis for a week and restaurants listed pop on their printed menus. But they didn’t always serve Pepsi. It was just as likely to be Coke or RC.

Of course, Chicago has its own linguistic oddities. People don’t wear sneakers — they wear gym shoes. And their homes don’t have living rooms — they have front rooms, pronounced “French rooms.” And although one of the larger chain of markets is Jewel, people say they shop at Jules.

And here in New England, everything makes sense. A milkshake is a frappe. If you ask for a milkshake, you’ll get a flavored milk. In Providence, it’s called a cabinet, where they also server grinders instead of subs.

Philadelphia has their steak sandwiches, which most of us know as Philly cheesesteak sandwiches. The terminology is fairly unambiguous (although the types of cheese used vary from place to place), but how you order it is intimidating. You order at one of two windows, and it’s important that you do it at the correct one. The “other” window is for beverages only, and if you want something to wash that steak sandwich down with, you’ll be stopping there, too, but you can’t get your beverage in the sandwich line, either.

If you want to really play up the part of out-of-town tourist, may I suggest you order a pop with that sandwich?

Soda vs Pop map
A graphical representation, by county, of a non-scientific study as to what term the local denizens use to refer to carbonated beverages. “Coke,” “Soda,” and “Pop” are the most common choices, but “Other” catches such terms as “Tonic” (used in the immediate Boston area by people of a certain age), “Cold Drink” (in some parts of the South), etc.

Learning Languages

French, German, Language, Portuguese

My first foreign language was French. The choice was simple, really. My high school offered one foreign language. I wanted to take a foreign language. So I took French.

At the timne, one taught French using dialogs. To this day, if someone were to ask me “Ou est Sylvie?” I would automatically answer “A la piscine” without giving it a second thought, because everyone knows that Sylvie is at the swimming pool.

I had really wanted to take German, and was disappointed that my high school didn’t offer it. As a consolation, it did teach English in a manner that required us to diagram our sentences. I thought, “Great! I’ll be all set to do this in German!” because some of the German textbooks I saw at a college library near me had people doing the same thing.

There were two other tie-ins to French that my high school had, which seemed to work to its advantage. The Canadian Consul General visited my high school when I was in the ninth grade to present several books about Canada and by Canadians. Almost half of them were in French. As a consequence, I could actually try reading some French that wasn’t a dialog. I could expand my horizons beyond whether Robert had two brothers or a sister. Life was looking up.

The second tie-in was our having to read A Separate Peace by John Knowles during which Gene writes “Je ne give a damn pas about le français” during a study session. So, French was a natural offering.

When I went to college, I had a chance to continue French. Fortunately, we were reading monologues and essays initially, expanding into literature and current events. I also had access to French language periodicals, so I could read l’Express and Paris Match. We also had a language lab where we listened to radio plays and could listen to ourselves doing oral exercises.

My first practical use of French was a visit to Montréal. (I actually got to go to Toronto during high school, but all I could really use French for there was to read product labels and Canadian banknotes.) In Montréal, I got to meet real, living Francophones. Announcements on the Métro were made in French, and I got to explain to my grandmother that “Merci” was not the French word for trash any more than “Thanks,” “Push,” “Pitch In!” or “Keep America Beautiful” were English words for trash, and that “Sortie” is not a station stop on the Métro but is the word for “Exit.”

My second practical use was in St Louis. There were several people making the same connection I was, and our originating flight was delayed leaving Boston — so much so that we were to miss our second flight and would have to spend the night in St Louis. As I was chatting with a seatmate, I realized there were a bunch of us that would be spending the night together in St Louis. Somehow, the fact that I knew some French came up, and he lit up like a Christmas tree. A woman from Paris was making the same connection, and she didn’t speak a word of English. While we were all standing in line at Hotel Voucher Central, people on the flight kept asking me to ask the woman various questions, and she would give me answers that I translated back to English. I was getting so good at this that, on the way to baggage claim, one of us had to make a call and was waiting for a call back at a pay phone when a guy starts to sit down at it to make a call himself. One of the women for whom I had been translating asked me to ask the guy to please leave the phone clear for an incoming call, so I walk up to him and ask him, very politely and in French, if he would mind using a different phone. I got a very strange look.

In college, I also had the opportunity to start my study of German. They had stopped teaching sentence diagramming, much to my consternation, since that was my primary motivation for putting up with studying it in English. I won’t say much about German here, since Mark Twain has written extensively about the German language. At this point, let me just say that, if you’re shopping for a German dictionary, look for the declension tables. If you don’t know what those are, you don’t need a German dictionary. If you do know what they are, and there are fewer than 30, keep looking. Remember, you have three genders and four cases to work with.

My first language in a post Me Talk Pretty One Day world is Portuguese. And if someone asks me “Onde està o cachorro?” I am ready.