Soda, coke or pop, you are what you say you drink

Published on 2009-01-29
by Janna Lewis Sentinel Staff

I was in Montana when it happened.

We’d gone out for pizza after a hard day of hauling furniture out of our moving van and into our house. The cashier took my order and then asked, “Would you like a pop?”

“How’d you like a sock in the jaw, buddy?” I responded, rolling up my sleeves.

He looked at me, horrified, and said, “I’m asking if you want a soft drink!”

“Oh. You mean a coke,” I said, calming down.

“Okay, a Coke.”

“No. I want a Dr Pepper.”

“We don’t have that.”

Oh my.

The great pop-versus-soda-versus-coke debate had reared its fizzy head in the arctic climes of the American Northwest courtesy of one displaced Texan.

I’m not endorsing a particular soft drink folks. I’m just telling you what Texans and Southerners mean when they order a “coke.” I’m using the lower case “c” here to differentiate between a generic soda pop and The Real Thing.

I grew up calling soft drinks “coke” because that’s just what we all did. It didn’t matter if it was Pepsi, Royal Crown Cola, Mr. Pibb or Coca-Cola, “coke” was –­­ as it remains – the all-purpose moniker for the carbonated stuff. I knew that if I ordered a coke at a fast food restaurant, the cashier would always ask, “What kind?” and I’d say, “Dr Pepper” or “Sprite” or whatever tickled my fancy at that time.

Is this silly? Probably. Does it matter? Well, yeah. It does. In this Information Age brought to us courtesy of the Internet, cell phones and television, we all are starting to lose our regional differences. Is this bad? No. But it is rather sad.

In my memories of my Texas childhood, the sound of a soft drink being poured into a glass of ice instantly brings me back to my grandmother’s front yard on the farm in Greenville. I can smell the watermelon as she cut it. I can hear the cows in the pasture bawling at feeding time. I can hear my father ask, “Do you want a coke?”

That takes me down a whole dirt road of memories related to the summer of 1974 when I was 8. My parents and I had just come home to Texas from Wisconsin after being away for two years. Hearing a soft drink called a coke instead of pop reminded me of home, as it still does.

When we lived in Wisconsin, my father took a lot of teasing about his reference to “pop” as a “coke.” It was good-natured, of course. He found it easier to order soft drinks at restaurants up there.

The first time he ordered iced tea at a restaurant, the waitress brought him a dish of ice cream. After that, he’d just ask for a coke and that’s what he’d get. He laughed about that for 30 years afterward.

Daddy used to buy soft drinks by the case. I remember them stacked up on the back porch at our house. He got a deal on both Coca-Cola and Pepsi from one of the grocery stores in town and bought about three cases of each.

There they were, stacked side by side, until one day my father’s German Shepherd took the Pepsi Challenge and dragged a six pack out to the back yard, biting into every can in that pack. Daddy said it looked like a carbonated cola version of the fountains of Bellagio in Las Vegas minus the music. He said that dog practically beat himself to death with his own tongue trying to catch all that flying soda.

Knowing what I know now about dogs and caffeine, I’m surprised Chance survived. It took about three sessions with soap and a garden hose to get the stuff out of his fur.

Nowadays, I barely touch the stuff. It leaves a nasty, sticky after-taste, a fuzzy feeling on my teeth and I’ve gotten so that I can’t stand it anymore. I pretty much stick with water or unsweetened iced tea. But I still know that a Coke is a coke, and so is a Dr Pepper, a Sprite, a 7-Up, a Pepsi and any other cola, un- or otherwise.

Besides, who the heck would want a “pop and a smile?” It just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.