Bottle of pop, please

In a story I read a few days ago, a guy from Los Angeles, visiting relatives in Minnesota, was asked if he wanted a bottle of pop.  He thought to  himself, "Pop.  I'd forgotten I was in the Midwest."

And yet, I grew up in Southwest Washington -- also on the West Coast -- and I always called a soft drink "pop."  So did everyone I knew.  It wasn't until I attended college in California that I heard those around me calling pop "soda."  It was one of those multi-cultural learning experiences, like learning not to pronounce "creek" as "crick."

What do I call it now?  I haven't called a soft drink "pop" for years.  But I don't call it soda, either, at least without feeling somewhat self-conscious that I'm speaking a foreign language.  I guess that what we called "pop" in my neck of the woods as a kid, I now call "a soft drink"

But the meaning really isn't the same.  When I think of "soft drink," I think of one of the several brands of cola.  And maybe root beer, or, for some folks, Dr. Pepper or Mountain Dew.  It's easier to just say "Coke" or "Diet Coke" or "Pepsi."  "Pop," on the other hand, encompassed a vast spectrum of colors and flavors.  

It's like saying that the French expression "une tasse de café" means a cup of coffee.  Literally it does, but -- at least before globalization and Starbucks appeared on the scene -- what a Parisian visualized as une tasse de café was something very different from what an American visualized as a cup of coffee -- which was usually, a large mug of black liquid poured out of a percolator. 

So, if "pop" didn't mean quite the same to me when I was a kid, how was it different from today's "soft drink," or "soda"?  Coke and Pepsi, were pop, of course, but pop wasn't reducible to cola drinks or root beer -- it came in many flavors.  Beyond that, a bottle of pop differed visually and tactilely from the usual can of soda one gets today in a store or out of a machine.

Pop came in bottles, unless it was served in a glass in a restaurant.  (Or "soda fountain," a term we used routinely, but mentally identifying "soda" with "ice cream soda," not with pop.)  They came in bright colors -- orange, lemon-lime, grape, cream (a light coffee color), raspberry, cherry, etc.  Moreover, the bottles usually were found resting in a bath of cold water -- either to be removed and paid for at the counter, or to be worked out of the water through a coin operated mechanism.  When you were thirsty, which as kids we usually were, nothing could beat that moment of anticipation as you held a bottle of brightly colored liquid in your hands, feeling the ice-cold water dripping off the bottle -- that moment just before you popped off the cap.

Before you got to the store, you would debate in your mind which flavor of pop you were going to buy, but it wasn't until you actually saw the bottles lined up in their cold water bath that you made your final decision.

So far as I know, pop doesn't come today in the full rainbow of flavors that it did when I was a boy -- although I like to think that in some dusty, small town store, a full array might still be found in an ancient pop dispenser.  Like much in our culture, the voice of advertising has smoothed out the voices of those multitudes of kids with disparate tastes.  "Soda" is California-speak, and that term may have the same connotations for Californians and their ilk as pop does for me; "soft drink," on the other hand, sounds like sales talk, an attempt by advertising folks to iron out the cultural differences among different parts of the country. 

To "blandify" us.  No kid ever begged for "a soft drink."  Many kids begged for "a bottle of pop."

But, as I say, I've abandoned "pop" from my vocabulary.  If I decline a beer today (rarely!), I'll say, "No thanks, but could I have a soft drink?"  I can't say, with a straight face, "How about a bottle of pop?"

Besides, true "pop" no longer really exists.