And if you’re in a hurry, cool it off with some dry ice!
Oh, gross. Kill it with fire.
Part of the Southern culture is we don’t give a damn if our language makes sense, because it’s our language, and anyone worth a toot knows what we mean. Y’all worrying that something is inefficient or inaccurate is just amusing to us.
Born and raised in East Texas and Live in South Louisiana and I’ve never heard an exchange like that in all my days, whereabouts are you from? I’m just curious as I’ve heard this myth about us southerners calling all soft drinks "coke"and I’d like to know what part of the south this comes from.
See the linguistic map linked at Post #15.
Well I took a look at that, and apparently I was born and raise in a county that 80-100% used coke a s generic term for soda, and now live in a parish that is 50-80% and yet I have literally never heard it. Sure we used call vending machines coke machines, but thats because most of them were and many still are Coca-Cola owned. My point is that no has ever, at home in in a restaurant asked what kind of coke I wanted. I’ve been asked if I want a “col drank” or a soda, but I think that this linguistic map is a little bit off. Now it might be that in the last 30 years since so many folks from the north have moved down south that the generic terms soda and soft drink have become more prevalent, but that map was made in 2003, and I just know that it cannot be that accurate.
Reading that brought back a 40 year old memory of my mom, working at a beauty shop. In the summer, I had to stay there with her until my dad got off work. The best part was the air conditioner. The second best part was a bottle of Dr. Pepper and bag of peanuts. I’d put about 10 peanuts in one of those small 8 oz. bottles, swish it around, drink the Dr. Pepper, then eat the now unsalted sweet peanuts.
I tried it once with a Coke but it wasn’t sweet enough with the salt in it.
It doesn’t taste right anymore since they started using HFCS instead of sugar.
+1
From the areas I’m familiar with, that map is useless.
ETA: But I have heard drink vending machines referred to generically as ‘coke machines.’
and looking at the map, the numbers polled amount to roughly .03% of the US population, so the sample size might mess with the numbers.
Statistically, that’s a huge sample size. For a population of 300 million, a confidence level of 99% and a confidence interval of ±1%, you only need a sample size just over 16,000.
Of course, this assumes we have a truly random sample and we have a survey that doesn’t unintentionally skew results one way or another. It would be nice to see the methodology, the way the question was phrased, when the survey was taken, etc.
OK, here’s the source of the numbers.
Here is the question as posed:
Methodology just seems to be an anonymous internet survey. So, obviously, anyone so inclined can purposefully skew results as they wish. Although I can’t fathom any good reason anyone would be so inclinded to do so. And the data I’m most familiar with–pop vs soda–seems pretty finely accurate to me from my experience. “Pop” is used throughout most of Wisconsin and Illinois, but Eastern Wisconsin is an exception, where “soda” seems to dominate. I’ve long noticed this, where in Milwaukee and up Door County, “soda” is the generic word, but head west towards Madison and Eau Claire, and you’re back in “pop” country. The survey seemed to do a good job finding that linguistic island of “soda” in the “pop” region of the Great Lakes. So I’m inclined to think it’s a good ballpark approximation of the soda vs pop vs coke areas. Although, by the nature of this poll, the responses are limited to those with internet access in 2003 (when the map was made–the survey has continued since then.)
It would be interesting to see a more methodical linguistic survey done.
The problem with that is that the county where I was born, Harris county, in Texas has over 3million residents. The surveyor at best polled maybe three person there and if those three happened to all say coke generically, then suddenly on the map, somewhere on the order of 2-3 million people do.
I’m not sure why you would think a poll with over 100,000 respondents would only have 3 votes from a part of the country with three million plus people. I don’t understand your logic there. Anyhow, there were 1,423 votes recorded from Harris county. You can click on the map and get detailed county results.
Harris County
Total: 1423
Pop: 11
Coke: 1178
Soda: 167
Other: 67
Sorry, the map linked to on that page isn’t clickable. This one is. My bad.
Even just under 1500 people is about .04% of the population of the county. My only point was that it simply isn’t representative of the entire populace. Thats not to say that there are not people that use coke as a generic term for carbonated beverage, but rather that based on the sample size its a bit much to assume that 80% of the population does.
For my own experience, that map is more of an indication on how the respondents answered to polls as opposed to what they actually use.
A sample of 1500 people is plenty. You only need a sample of about 400 people for 95% confidence level with 5 point confidence interval.The population size doesn’t even matter that much. Whether the sample is for one million or 100 million, you only need 384 samples for the parameters above. That’s exactly how sampling/polling works. The trick is getting a representative sample.
What I’m saying is, the sample size should be more than enough to represent the target population with a very high degree of confidence. Where the error may lay, if this is in error, is in the methodology. And I’ve outlined my problems with the methodology above.
And this is one very good critique. I’d be more interested in somebody analyzing the actual speech of locals than a self-reporting poll. People often think they speak one way when they actually speak another. (Pronunciation is one area I’ve noticed that people can be quite inaccurate about.)
If the original poster’s name, DCnDC, means he/she is a resident of Washington,
D. C., I can relate, since I was born and raised till age 11 in D. C., which at the time was considered a southern town. (Moved to nearby Maryland suburbs in late '50’s). All my maternal ancestors were Washingtonians and Virginians. Paternal ancestors were mid-westerners and later Virginians. I grew up with unsweetened ice tea. (I don’t recall if other family members preferred sweetened. Don’t think so.) Unsweetened (or “plain iced tea” as we called it) was at dinner; later in the evening, we drank Coca Cola (this was before the big change in the kind of sugar used). To this day, I prefer unsweetened, very strong iced tea as my main beverage. In our travels south of Virginia, when dining, I’ve asked for “plain iced tea” and the waiter then asked “sweetened or unsweetened.” At first, I was really annoyed by this; “plain iced tea”! What the hell do you think that means? But recognizing we were in the south where “plain” didn’t mean much, I eventually managed to ask for “unsweetened iced tea, no lemon.”
I thought there was a war, and you guys were on the Other Side. 