Beyond Soda vs. Pop
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Just me on Wednesday, April 28, 2010 9:48 PM
Not long before my sister married her husband, she travelled across the country to Idaho to meet his family. At one point during her visit, she got caught in a funny situation while conversing with two of her future sisters-in-law.
The topic of the conversation was gardening, and Sister A mentioned that she liked to wear thongs when pulling weeds. Sister B expressed her disbelief: how could this possibly be comfortable? Sister A insisted that it was.
Branwen sat silent, bewildered at the intimate turn the discussion had suddenly taken… when Sister B said that she herself much preferred to wear a pair of old sneakers.
See, here in Michigan, the word “thong” refers to undergarments. We call those casual sandals “flip-flops.”
It’s well-known that - despite the fact that we all speak the same language - there are plenty of geographical variations in vocabulary throughout the United States. The best-documented example is the “pop” vs. “soda” vs. “Coke” phenomenon. Did you know there’s an entire website dedicated to the topic?
As a person who’s lived my whole life in Michigan, I’m always interested to hear the words that people from other parts of the country use in place of the ones I’m accustomed to. For instance, we call big semi trucks “rigs” but my brother-in-law’s family uses “rig” to refer to all cars, right down to the smallest coupe. To us, a Ford F-150 is a “truck.” To them, it is always a “pickup.”
Can you believe it was just a couple years ago that I discovered that those small colored things on top of donuts are referred to by some people as “jimmies”? I have always known them as “sprinkles.”
The variations are not just geographical, either. In my own hometown, where I grew up calling hard candies on sticks “lollipops,” most of the kids called them “suckers.” (I refused to make the switch. “Lollipop” is such a delightful word to say!)
What fun variations in vocabulary have you come across? And where are you on the soda/pop/coke, thong/flip-flop, car/rig/truck/pickup, sprinkle/jimmy, and lollipop/sucker maps?
(image courtesy of Wordle)
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