Background: This column was originally published in the Winston Reporter, March 15, 2007. Because my UO alumnus classmate John Sowell this past week posted his own informal survey on Facebook, about the subject of pop versus cola, I thought this was a good time to re-post this column.
When I visited my late Aunt Ann in Riverside, California I told her I was going down to the neighborhood 7-11 to get a pop. Her confused reply was, "Now where did you hear that from?" Apparently, she may have been thinking that my father, who grew up in Pennsylvania and later lived in southern California, hadn't done a good enough job of teaching me the correct terminology for referencing a sugar-laden, carbonated beverage.
But an article in the March/April 2007 issue GRIT re-assured me I wasn't the only one who called a pop a pop. A professor with the department cartography and geography at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, and one of his students, conducted an informal internet survey to chart the dividing lines in the soft drink debate. According to their research, a broad swath of the country agrees with me. States in the Pacific Northwest, the Mid-West, and the Great Lakes region all say pop.
California, Arizona, southern Florida, and pockets in the Mid-West and eastern states all say soda. Texas, New Mexico, and a large section of the deep South say Coke. Just as people use the trademark names Xerox and Band-Aid to refer to other brands of photocopies and bandages, apparently some people say they want a Coke when they actually want a 7-up. Sill, other people who live in the southeastern U.S. call soft drinks by a different name.
The soft drink debate is the type of quirky article one will find in the GRIT newspaper. Oops, excuse me, magazine. I still don don't know what to call the 125-year-old publication. The issue that features the soft drink debate looks more like the type of magazine one would find at the local check-out stand. It's a magazine, with 100 glossy pages of color photos and advertisements for products like gorilla glue and tractor equipment.
If I didn't enjoy GRIT "magazine" so much, I would be upset with the nationwide publication. That's because it hasn't been a magazine for 125 years. In fact, until just a couple years ago, GRIT was printed in newspaper format.
When I delivered GRIT as a teen-ager, it was a weekly newspaper. Unlike any other weekly publication, ambitious youth would mail in their application to become a GRIT boy (or girl). The company would mail a bundle of newspapers from their Pennsylvania offices to the carrier's home address. Grit carriers would go door-to-door in their communities one evening a week, delivering and collecting money for the paper. Carriers kept a few cents from each paper sold for their commission and mailed the balance back to GRIT.
I lost track of GRIT until I visited my late aunt's home in Coquille. She had piles of GRITs and another newspaper I had never heard of before, CAPPER'S. GRIT was still a newspaper, but it was no longer delivered door-to-door on a weekly basis. The Topeka, Kansas-based semi-monthly (every other month) publication was now delivered by the postal service.
This past year I ran across the "new and improved" GRIT. Still based in Topeka, still published every other month, GRIT had evolved into a magazine. No complaints from me, except their inaccurate slogan that proclaims "America's Rural Lifestyle Magazine For 125 Years."
The modern generation of readers may believe it's been a magazine for more than a century, but I know better. GRIT will always be a newspaper to me. And a Coke will always be a pop, regardless of what others may choose to call it.
No comments:
Post a Comment