Craig from Helena, Montana, wonders about the etymology of pop as a term for a carbonated beverage. Depending on which part of the country you’re from, you might also call this drink a soda or a coke. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Soda Pop Name Origin”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, yeah, this is Craig Sundberg from Helena, Montana, and I was calling about my question of pop, because that was a popular term used in the Buton, Anaconda, Montana area when I grew up.
Pop meaning what?
For like a soda, you know, for somebody who wanted a Coke, we’d say, you know, you have a pop.
Right, so P-O-P, pop. And where do you live now?
I live in Helena. I’m from Buton, Anaconda area, which is pretty much where I’d always heard it growing up.
It’s a pretty straightforward story on pop. It goes back to when people first started carbonating their beverages, which is actually probably older than you might think, a couple hundred years at least.
There’s a really nice citation for it in one of the dictionaries that talks about when you push open the lid to a carbonated drink, it makes a popping noise. It’s literally about the sound it makes when the cork comes out of the bottle.
Oh, wow.
That makes sense, right?
That’s too simple. It makes perfect sense.
Yeah, absolutely. And so we’ve just used it ever since.
Hi. It’s more of a common term than I know because I live all over the western United States, and I just never really heard it much before other than that area.
Oh, yeah. No, there are whole big parts of the country that use pop to refer to carbonated beverages. As a matter of fact, this is one of the most discussed dialect terms in American English.
And if you Google soda pop map, you will come up with a lot of really great maps that show you where people use these terms.
Oh, interesting. That’s pretty cool.
Craig, thank you for your call. Really appreciate it.
Thank you. I appreciate the time. Have a good day.
All right. Take care. Bye.
So just pop goes the top or pop goes the cork, right?
Yeah. You know, he didn’t ask about soda, but soda is one we’re talking about for just a second.
Sure.
Soda actually was the name for a couple of different plants, the kinds of salt worts that grow on beaches where there’s sand. And when they burn, they create a kind of ash known as soda ash that helps you create things like glass.
So you’re on the beach where there’s a ton of silica anyway, right?
Right.
And so the term, it’s directly related to baking soda. That soda is related to the word sodium. And so these are all complicated together.
But we call it soda because of the early combinations of chemicals that you might drink sometimes would have baking soda in them in order to create that bulliness.
Yep.
And, of course, those of us from the South call it Coke.
Yeah.
No matter what.
So in Louisville, you called it Coke?
Oh, absolutely.
I wasn’t sure if it went that far north.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah. People would, you know, the waitress would come up to the table and say, what do you want? And I’d say a Coke. And she’d say, what kind? And I’d say grape.
A grape Coke, of course.
Sure, naturally.
