Pop, soda or coke? Web votes define borders of debate

JACKSON, Miss. -- In the South it's called coke, even when it's Pepsi. Many in Boston say tonic. A precious few even order a fizzy drink.

But all those generic names for soft drink are linguistic undercards in the nation's carbonated war of words. The real battle: pop vs. soda.

Order a soda in Michigan or Minnesota and you're clearly an outsider. Ask for pop in New York City and you risk being ridiculed. Bert Vaux, a linguistics professor at Harvard, says many Americans are overly passionate about their beverage name.

"For reasons that are unclear to me people feel they have license to attack those who say pop as stupid or illogical," Vaux said. "I use coke because I grew up in Houston. They're not too fond of that around here. However, it's not as stigmatized as saying pop."

The pop-soda-coke divide has always created vague, and usually incorrect, assumptions about who says what where, Vaux said. But for the first time, Internet technology -- and 29,000 votes on a Web site -- has defined the debate's borders.

The site, created eight years ago as a college project, asks visitors to enter their childhood ZIP code and the soft drink term they use. Their vote is then placed on a U.S. map as a colored dot.

What has emerged is a swath of coke votes across the South, pop votes in the Midwest and Canada, and soda votes in the Northeast and California, and -- curiously -- in St. Louis and Milwaukee.

Who's winning? It's, um, bottle neck and neck. Pop and soda each have about 11,300 votes, or 39 percent. Coke has about 4,800 votes.

Seethu Seetharaman, a marketing professor at St. Louis' Washington University, said the data isn't reliable because it's not a random sample.

But North Carolina State University linguistics professor Walt Wolfram disagreed, saying the pop-soda-coke divide is regional and not based on race, age or income.

Either way, the site is giving linguists reams of data about a dialect variable with limited research behind it.

"It's blazed a trail for doing serious linguistic study over the Internet," said Vaux, who uses the site in his Harvard classes.

McConchie, raised in Washington state, grew up in a pop area, explaining why his Web page says pop people "are much, much cooler."

After going to school in California, he now lives in upstate New York -- soda areas both. When ordering a cola now, which term does he use? None of them.

"I don't really drink it that much anymore," he said.