This is A Much Cooler Map Than Red/Blue Election Maps

Here, via Instapundit, is the linguistic map for how people refer to a soft drink.  Its interesting how you adjust.  I grew up in Texas and called every soft drink a "coke" and now I call it a "soda", which are both the dominant terms in the places I have lived in each phase of my life.   For the record, though, I have never, ever called it a "pop", or as they say in the midwest, a "pahhhp" (click for larger map)

Totalcounty

3 Comments

  1. Dave:

    Surprising, I grew up in a yellow county(soda) in Arizona, but we always called it coke. What surprises me is that the map shows no continuity across the Navajo Reservation, you would think it would be more uniform.

  2. Highway:

    It's really an interesting map, but small sample sizes in lots of places really skew things. For instance, Maryland shows a couple of 'coke' counties, but there are only about 2 responses from them, iirc. I thought that island of 'soda' in Missouri was the most interesting thing.

  3. coyote:

    Highway - its even worse than that - I think the survey was web based and people self-selected to join, so to some extent it has all the problems of a poll on cnn.com. Never-the-less, I thought it was fun and it does sortof fit my intuition (built from having lived in nearly 20 different US cities)