History is full of fierce debates that have shaped our world. Nature vs. nurture, Lincoln vs. Douglas, and Kendrick vs. Drake.
But there might be no greater debate—no dividing line deeper—than the name that we use for a sweet, fizzy, carbonated beverage. Whether you call it pop, soda, or coke depends largely on where you live. For a long time, the Midwest has been loyal to pop.
But is that still the case?
“For us Midwesterners, it's pop. There's no other way around it. We go to Florida. because you know we do shows. We travel across the country. [People say] ‘Oh, this is a great soda!’ I said, ‘No, it's pop,’” said Steve Stamenkovich, national accounts manager for Intrastate Distributors, which manufactures the Detroit-based pop brand Towne Club.
Not everyone is quite as resolute as Stamenkovich, though. We ran into Nate Kleinman at the Ann Arbor Art Fair, where he was visiting from Philadelphia. And he wanted to know this:
“I'm wondering if pop instead of soda is losing steam as a word that you all use… I've heard that pop is, it's starting to fade. Is that right?”
Say it isn’t so! Could our beloved pop be settling into plain old soda?
“If linguistics is ever going to break the internet, it's going to be over one of these pop soda coke debates or maps because people are fascinated by it. And they have very strong opinions about what is right,” said linguist Anne Curzan.
Curzan is a professor of English at the University of Michigan and also the host of the Michigan Public podcast That’s What They Say, all about the quirks of the English language. That’s why we thought she was the perfect person to help us get to the bottom of Nate Kleinman’s question.
But first, how did we get so many different names for the same product?
Curzan said that soda was first to the lexicon, thanks to a name that might be familiar: Johann Jacob Schweppe. In the late 1700s, he developed a process to carbonate mineral water using sodium bicarbonate–also known as baking soda.
“And that is why we call it soda. And we get soda water in 1802. And then just soda by the 1830s," Curzan said. "This is why soda was often served in drugstores—because it was a health drink.”
Eventually, pharmacists started sweetening these concoctions with fruit and herbs, creating the precursors to what we know today as pop, soda, coke, soft drinks, etc.
Pop was not far behind in its entrance to the English language. Its first recorded use was in 1812, though not in Michigan (which wasn’t even a state at that point). Instead, it was a British poet who first noted the use of the word pop.
“So it's in a letter by Robert Southey,” explained Curzan, “And he says ‘a new manufactory of a nectar between soda water and ginger beer and called pop because pop goes the cork when it is drawn.’”
For a long time, though, Americans were not really settled on what to call a sweet carbonated beverage. In the 1930s, Curzan told us, the Dictionary of American Regional English actually sent out field workers to ask people about what they called it (among other questions).
“And they got the word soda, soda water, pop, and soda pop,” she said.
The fieldworkers described it, Curzan added, as an “unstable linguistic situation.”
It wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that the dividing lines between who says pop, soda, and coke became a bit clearer. In the 1960s, Curzan explained, we began to see the regional differences start to settle.
People in the Northeast were more likely to say soda. Those in the South were using coke as a generic term. And, of course, Midwesterners landed on pop as their preferred term. While we can’t be entirely sure why the dividing lines fell the way they did, Curzan said there’s a good chance that it has to do with one iconic Detroit pop brand.
“What we do know is that the Faygo company used the word pop to refer to their carbonated beverages. And they started advertising at Detroit Tigers games in the 1960s.”
Faygo wasn’t the only Michigan company that adopted the pop terminology. In 1959, Harold Samhat founded Towne Club and build up the business around its retail “pop shops.” At the height of its popularity, said Stamenkovich, the brand operated around 50-60 of these pop shops around the region.
“The store would say on the front pop shop, Towne Club pop shop. You walk in there and there's shelves of all different flavors, like maybe 4 or 5 shelves, 20 feet to 30 feet long,” recalled Stamenkovich.
Back then he said, Towne Club carried between 30 to 40 flavors of pop in glass bottles. Customers would fill up wooden crates with whatever mix of flavors they liked.
“You put it in the wooden crate and that's it. And you walk out. $2.40 for a case of 24 back then,” he added.
But what about today? Are Michiganders still loyal to the term pop?
“From what we can tell, and linguists are studying this as I speak, American dialects do not seem to be getting weaker,” said Curzan. “People actually don't want to all sound the same. We want to sound like our communities, be those regional communities or social communities. So while there are globalizing and nationalizing pressures, from what we can tell, the pop soda coke distinction is not about to disappear.”
Curzan said that studies mapping the use of pop, soda, and coke have remained pretty consistent over time. And there are still plenty of people who are happy to go to bat for their preferred term.
Cartographer Alan McConchie has an ongoing crowd-sourced linguistic geography project called Pop vs. Soda. It asks people for their hometown and their preferred term for a sweet, carbonated beverage. An important caveat here: this is not a scientific study. These data were self-reported, not randomly sampled. But so far, more than 400,000 people have responded.
And Michiganders seem to be particularly tuned into this debate. Of all the American states, Michigan had the highest number of respondents–around 32,000 people.
Those responses bear out what Curzan told us about the persistence of a distinctly Midwestern dialect. Around 64% of respondents from Michigan said they use the term pop, while about 34% percent said soda. Less than one percent said coke.
So there you have it, Nate. Soda might have a few toeholds in Michigan, but pop is still king in the Mitten state.
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