Truly, I call it by whatever it is (diet Coke, Sprite, etc.), but as a Southern girl, we never referred to it as pop or soda. And growing up in Georgia, we pretty much just had Coke!

sub
hoagie
grinder
hero
"italian"

You know Xerox and Qtip used to threaten people with lawsuits because they were using their product name as the generic word for photo copy and cotton swab. They were and probably still are real anal about it.

No, it is not. Chocolate is chocolate. Candy is Skittles, Starburst, hot lips, cherry blasters...

Y'know, this isn't the worst thread ever, but...goddamn! What a bunch of yippies.

This smacks me as wrong. I'm not breakin your nuts or anything, but companies strive to get such universal brand-recognition that people substitute their brand name for the functional name. It is a marketing department's wettest of wet dreams. It's like putting your name on the whole genre.

(Kleenex to other tissue manufacturers) "Hol' onto my pocket, lil' bitch! Yall's name Susan now."

Yeah, somehow, being from Coweta County Georgia, OL Kurtz picked up a phill accent (Thanks, Doc) and will say things like "fode" and "sope" for Food and Soup. He should be beaten with a rubber hose until he quits.

And count me among those that have never, ever heard the term bubbler in reference to a fucking water fountain.

hoagies and grinders
hoagies and grinders
navy beans
navy beans
navy beans
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
SLOPPY JOES
M-SLOP-M-SLOPPY JOES

You ask him what flavor, and he replies "Diet Pepsi"…or something.

the thing that freaked me out more than anything was when the wife and I were going to go skiing and she told me she didn't have a toboggan and would have to go to the store.

i said we were going skiing not sledding.

turns out toboggan means what we would call a stocking cap.

i looked at her without saying a word for about 30 seconds.

velcro too.



as for me:

soda
hoagie
candy bar
water fountain

and i'll add a new one
jimmies

sprinkles.

once it becomes too common they lose their right to the name.
so you want your name to mean the product, but you have to legally pretend that you don't.

I've heard this Coke- means- anything- with- bubbles position before, but not in the part of the South I grew up in. If you wanted a Coke, you asked for it. If you wanted anything else, you asked for that.

Pop was that physical act you delivered to the mouth of the punk who didn't know when to shut up.

Soda was the box that had Arm & Hammer on it.

Yeah, I guess I can see it. Seven periods of school, seven beatings a day. Roughly seven stitches a beating, and eventually seven years to life.

yeah, in texas, if it's carbonated, it's a coke, regardless of its color or flavor.

and dusty, i think that this has less to do with class, and more with regional dialect and colloquialism. this is the sort of shit that linguistic students cream themselves over.

having lived in texas, missouri, oregon, and massachusetts, the funny thing is that I am not always sure where a particular dialectical idiosyncracy comes from. a few i am sure about, like "wicked". that's from me being a masshole, no doubt about it.

i say "wooder fount in"

ha ha, just like my aunt from Haddonfield.

i interviewed a woman who drank
"bout twelve'uf these a'daye."
she was referring to pepsi.

pepsi causes brain damage.

yep. we actually had a discussion at some family event about this one.

but i say stocking cap.

i call it "soft drink". But then again so does everyone outside of the US (i think)

I still say "yessum" when answering in the affirmative to an older female.

and yessir to older men.

and "tha's raht" to affirm something

I gotta admit, I miss hearing this. I still say it sometimes. My niece and nephews still say it, thank goodness, but I very rarely hear kids say ma'am and sir anymore. And when they say it to me, I burn through them with my "burn in hell/I ain't that old yet" stare.