Name Games

American Demographics, Feb 1, 2003

Byline: JOHN FETTO

The age-old debate over what to call a soft drink appears to be, well, a pop-up. Thirty-eight percent of Americans refer to effervescent beverages as "soda" and another 38 percent call it "pop," according to an informal Internet poll of more than 100,000 individuals. There is also a sizable minority (19 percent) who refer to carbonated beverages merely as "Coke" - even when it's a Pepsi. The ongoing survey, which began eight years ago as a college project by students enrolled at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., asks visitors to the site (www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~almccon/pop_soda/) to enter the ZIP code for the town they grew up in and the term they use for soft drinks. Respondents' votes are then placed on a map as colored dots. Researchers have found wide linguistic variation by region. For instance, "Coke" is most often used in the South, "pop" in the Midwest and "soda" in the Northeast and Southwest. Interestingly, Missouri and Wisconsin (the St. Louis and Milwaukee areas, in particular) are islands of "soda" afloat in a sea of Midwestern "pop."