Depends on what part of the South. I've heard "Cokecola." But I grew up just calling all soft drinks "Coke." This distinquished the drink from tea (always iced; no other kind was known), or sometimes "sweet tea," especially as concerns with diabetes grew (or maybe that was just me. My mother was diabetic for as long as I was aware, and put saccarine in the tea to make it sweet. I took that for granted until I realized it was a sugar substitute, long after I'd left home.) Coffee, contrariwise, was always hot. I encountered iced coffee in high school. It was a Yankee thing; the only person I knew who drank it was an iconoclast, a revered figure in my teen-aged eyes.Co-cola. https://t.co/Bp1IN5lwgR
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) February 8, 2021
"Coke" referred to soft drinks, and had to be particularized. You'd be asked if you wanted a "Coke," to which you'd reply "What ya got?" And then you learned if the offer was actually for "Cokecola" or Dr. Pepper or some other, lesser brand. In Texas Dr. Pepper outranked Cokecola in preference and status, but only barely. And yes, it was known to be served hot; though I never knew anybody who did that. We drank it cold, even in winter. Because it's what you did.
Complexities abound.In Scotland they call soda "juice" and tap water is called "council juice" https://t.co/AjZr6NqcoK.
— Evan O’Connell (@evanoconnell) February 8, 2021
Gotta admit, I've never, ever heard carbonated beverages referred to as "fizzy drinks." I do remember "Fizzies," which you dropped in water to make a weak version of Alka-Seltzer, without the salty taste and about the only thing I knew of as a child that could ruin a good glass of water. Fizzies only live on in memory in the schoolyard rejection of a joke: "That was as funny as a flash flood in a Fizzie factory." Which as meant to show sophistication and maturity, and never uttered by anyone older than 10.
Anyway, back to the Scots: the proper appellation for "fizzy drinks" is regional, it appears. "Juice" is preferred on the east coast, "Ginger" on the west. Which reminds me of the enormous Scots-Irish heritage in the South. Which, technically, is my heritage, too. My father found our family name, which we'd assumed as dead English, to be extremely common in phone books in Ireland; and quite rare in England.
So I'm stickin' with "Coke" as a generic term. It's the culture I was born into; it's the culture I'll die in.
What? I'm old. You think about these things....
Well, that just goes without saying.He's drinking Pepsi, which CLEARLY condemns him in the minds of all right-thinking people. https://t.co/Drw7nvmuMI
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) February 8, 2021
We grew up in New England calling carbonated bottled soft rinks "tonic" when my mother first went to Philadelphia to work in the hospitals in WWII she ordered "tonic" someplace and they gave her quinine water, something that she'd never encountered before.
ReplyDeleteHey, you leave coffee on the counter here this time of year, it's iced coffee in five minutes. I'd drink it two days later if I hadn't had any yet.
I actually love iced coffee, and brew it in the summer. Don’t drink iced tea like I used to. Age changes some things.
ReplyDeleteI usually use "Coke" as the generic term but have used "Co-cola" since that's what my grandmama said (in central South Carolina). When I was young, I would only drink it hot. I have no idea why since no one else I knew drank it hot and my family thought I was crazy.
ReplyDeleteAs to coffee, I never had heard of iced coffee til I was in college. The Wesley Foundation minister drank it in the afternoons and offered me some.