ELECTION DAY SPECIAL: Pop vs. Soda vs. Coke

While many news outlets will be showing you red state/blue state maps today, we here at Soda Pop Culture are going the extra mile and presenting you a map with LOTS of colors. This little beauty is from a website called popvssoda.com, and it shows the results of a survey that correlates your birthplace with the generic term you use for soft drinks. (Granted, the site says it was last updated in 2003, but carbonated-beverage colloquialisms, thankfully, do not shift as quickly as the winds of politics.) Your basic color code: the blue area is where the term "pop" prevails, those in the red area tend to call every fizzy drink a "Coke," and natives of the khaki/camo precincts favor "soda." What conclusions can we draw from this data? Survey creator Alan McConchie makes the deceptively clever observation that, "People who say 'pop' are much, much cooler," and I would add that people who knowingly call a Sprite a Coke may, perhaps, have spent too many roasting-hot summer days mixing said Coke with Everclear and drinking the resulting hellbrew out of the gaping mouth of some sort of bullfrog.