Want an example of how pop culture changes through time? Literally, "pop" culture.

 

Right, so picture this. The year is 1947. The war’s over, the highways are spreading like veins, and Americans are beginning to discover that they can all watch the same television show, eat the same brand of cereal, and—if they like—call their soft drink whatever everyone else calls it. But not yet. In that year, you could still draw a linguistic border across the country as clearly as a front line on a map.

In the North, from Minnesota clear across to Washington, the drink in your hand was “pop.” It’s a word that snaps when you say it. Short, bright, cheerful—like the sound it names. It comes from the British “popwater,” the hiss and bang of a cork leaving a bottle, a bit of linguistic onomatopoeia that immigrants brought over and never quite let go. And in those northern towns—many of them Scandinavian, German, British in heritage—the word took root. It was what you drank at the church picnic, at the corner store, after mowing the lawn. “Pop” belonged to the language of small towns, of the middle of the country.

Meanwhile, down South, something quite different was happening. There, a new invention had become a kind of holy relic: Coca-Cola. It had been born in Atlanta in the late nineteenth century and by the 1940s had conquered the South completely. When a product becomes that powerful, it stops being a brand and becomes a category. People didn’t ask for a soft drink—they asked for a Coke. The waitress would nod and ask, “What kind?” And you might say, “Root beer.” In the South, Coke wasn’t a drink. It was the idea of a drink.

And out on the coasts—New York, Los Angeles—there was “soda.” The word came from the old soda fountains, the sparkling concoctions of the late nineteenth-century pharmacies. “Soda” was urban, stylish, served with a scoop of ice cream and a maraschino cherry. Immigrants in New York, movie stars in Hollywood—it was a word of the cities.

Now fast forward to 2023, and you’ll notice that the map looks quite different. “Pop” has shrunk. “Soda” has expanded. And “Coke” still clings to its southern homeland like a Confederate flag of carbonation. What happened?

What happened is that culture became centralized. The rise of national advertising, television, film, and later the internet—all of it radiated influence from the great cultural capitals: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco. “Soda” became the word you heard in movies, in commercials, on sitcoms. It was what people on Friends and Seinfeld drank. And so “soda,” the cosmopolitan word of the coasts, began to seep inland, eroding the old linguistic borders.

There’s something poignant about that. Because language, like landscape, holds memory. The word “pop” still clings to the northern plains because it’s part of how people there imagine themselves—friendly, modest, practical. “Soda” belongs to the language of style, of media, of national sameness. And “Coke,” in its southern sense, remains a monument to brand loyalty so deep it rewrote the dictionary.

So next time someone asks if you want a pop, or a soda, or a Coke—what they’re really saying is: where are you from, and who are your people? Because beneath that innocent fizz of carbonation lies a map of American identity—drawn not in borders, but in bubbles.