Do you want a soda, a pop, or a coke?

Coca-cola is certainly one of the most known trade marks in the world and almost everybody knows what it is: a kind of soda or pop. Looking at the dictionary, soda and pop are synonyms, so everything seems logical. But then, we realize that if we ask for a Cola drink in some parts of Britain and the US and we receive only a Coca-cola, not a Pepsi; even we can also ask for a soda and we will receive again a Coca-cola. How is it?. Very simple, the power advertising has in food, and of course, in language.

The real controversy of all that is actually found in the United States, where in each bar or restaurant you can be given different things depending on the word used. As you can see in this map, different “cultures of the soft drink” have been settled in each zone. Soda is more popular in the southwest and northeast areas (curiously in the most “mass-media and fashionable” cities) ; pop is used more in the northwest and ; and coke is used in the south. You can think that it does not really matter which term we use, but it does. Notice how careful you must be with this name because, for instance, if you are asking for coke in Texas, what you want is some cocaine.

Historically, the term “cola” was created by Coca-cola, but curiously nowadays it is used for Pepsi too, whereas the word “coke” (which existed before, being a sort of synonym with soda) is now used only for Coca-cola. What it seemed logical at first was changing and changing on, leaving us another instance of how related linguistics, food and advertising are.

All in all, with advertising or not, soda, pop, soda pop, coke, cola or whatever, will be always what they should be called: soft carbonated drinks.