Vernor’s Ginger Soda claims to be America’s “First Soft Drink.”
I’m not asking whether the claim is true. I’m asking what it means.
My guess is “The first no-alcohol product distributed in America intended to be drunk for non-medicinal purposes.”
Is that right? If so, then is the claim true? If not, then what does the phrase mean?
-FrL0
I would add: carbonated. Carbonation seems to be a major component of modern “soft drinks”; yes, lemonade, iced tea, etc., can sometimes be considered “soft drinks”, but I think the general conception of “soft drink” requires:
Maybe you should also add “non-nutritious”. Fruit juices like apple and orange juice certainly aren’t soft drinks.
Perhaps Sasspirilla?
I’d echo toadspittle about the carbonation.
I suppose it would be a cheap laugh to say that toadspittle is not a soft drink. However, Americans went more than a century without carbonation. Early beer didn’t even have it. The first American soft drink was water.
The Inuit drank it. The Mayas drank it. The Dineh drank it. This was long before they met Mr. Vernor, God bless him 
.
Saspirilla isn’t carbonated (still good though.)
Yes, but did anyone ever call it a “soft drink”? When was the term first coined, and to what did it refer? I think we need to answer that last question before we can assume things like “carbonated,” “sweetened,” or even “non-nutrious” in the definition of the term. Sure, that’s what we mean now, but is that what we meant then?
‘First’ is potentially a vague term here; it is most often used to indicate the earliest item in an order, but it can also mean the top-ranking item within a category; I’m not saying it is necessarily the case here, but I’m sure I’ve seen it used in advertising contexts where it meant nothing much more than “well, we think we’re the best” or “we think you should try us before our competitors” - i.e. “WidgetCorp - First for all your widget needs”.
When I visited the Dr. Pepper Museum in Waco, TX at the time it was owned by Cadbury-Schwepps (which makes their own, competing [no competition, though]) ginger ale, the soda-pop timeline there indicated Vernor’s as being the first soda-pop-coke-softdrink-whatever. So if the fierce, unrelated competition can admit it, it may not be so much a marketing claim.
You can’t make Boston Coolers with other types of ginger ale, either.
“Soft Drink” was used in contrast to “hard liquor”. I don’t know when it was first used. Colonial practice was to drink a lot of alcohol. Probably because a lot of water was contaminated, even kids drank “small beer” (stuill alcohol-containing, but not as much as the regular stuff). I suppose lemonade would qualify as a soft drink. Carbonation would not be required – we just happen to have a lot of sodas today. Kool Aid and Gator Ade would certainly qualify as soft drinks.
Ginger ales and Ginger Beers existed before Vernors. I suspect they’re claiming to be the oldest widely distributed brand, and specifically to be claiming to be older than Coca Cola.