Soda, pop or coke: Americans still split three ways over fizzy drinks
A 2003 Harvard survey found over half of Americans say soda, a quarter say pop, and about one in eight call every fizzy drink a coke. The drinks behind the argument trace back to Joseph Priestley's carbonated water of 1767 and, much further, to the sweet fruit sharbats of the medieval Middle East.
Soft means only that there is no real alcohol. Many places allow a trace, under 0.5 percent by volume, before a drink counts as alcoholic. Most are carbonated and sweetened, whether with sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, fruit juice or, in diet versions, sugar substitutes, and many carry caffeine, colouring and preservatives.
Sweet flavoured drinks are old. People across the medieval Middle East drank sharbat made with lemon, pomegranate, tamarind, sumac, mint and honey, and the fashion spread to Europe, where the very word syrup comes from Arabic. Tudor England had water imperial, a lemony sweet drink containing cream of tartar. Fizz arrived later: within about a decade of Priestley's discovery, European inventors were making carbonated water in bulk, and J. J. Schweppe founded his company in 1783 to sell the first bottled soft drink. Dr Pepper followed in 1885 and Coca-Cola a year later.
The names people use form a map. In the American survey, soda ruled the Northeast, California and the areas around Milwaukee and St. Louis; pop held the Midwest and Pacific Northwest; and coke, a brand turned generic, dominated the South. Eastern Massachusetts has its own fading word, tonic. English-speaking Canada mostly says pop, except Montreal.
Across the Atlantic, Britain favours fizzy drink, Ireland says mineral, and Scots may ask for fizzy juice, juice or ginger. South Africans call any of them a cool drink. Other languages generalise from one flavour: Bohemian Czech uses limonada for all such drinks, lemon or not, and Slovak uses malinovka, literally raspberry water, whatever the taste.
Source: Soft drink
