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?
