1099. Do you call it "pop," "soda," or "coke"? We look at the interesting history behind these regional names for carbonated beverages. Then, we look at words where you can use a Q without a U, which might help your Scrabble game.
1099. Do you call it "pop," "soda," or "coke"? We look at the interesting history behind these regional names for carbonated beverages. Then, we look at words where you can use a Q without a U, which might help your Scrabble game.
The pop, soda or coke segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." It originally appeared in The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license. You can find Valerie at valeriefridland.com.
The Q segment was written by Karen Lunde, a career writer and editor. In the late '90s, as a young mom with two kids and a dog, she founded one of the internet's first writing workshop communities. These days, she facilitates expressive writing workshops, both online and off. Find her at chanterellestorystudio.com.
🔗 Share your familect recording in a WhatsApp chat.
🔗 Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.
🔗 Subscribe to the newsletter.
🔗 Take our advertising survey.
🔗 Get the edited transcript.
🔗 Get Grammar Girl books.
🔗 Join Grammarpalooza. Get ad-free and bonus episodes at Apple Podcasts or Subtext. Learn more about the difference.
| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475).
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.
| Grammar Girl Social Media: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook.Threads. Instagram. LinkedIn. Mastodon. Bluesky.
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to talk about the reasons people say "pop," "soda," or "coke," and then, to boost your Scrabble score, we'll look at words where you can use a Q without a U.
But first, thanks to the listeners who got in touch to tell me how to pronounce the Russian word for bread that is spelled "xleb." Apparently, the X is pronounced like an H, so it is "hleb."
This next segment is by linguist Valerie Fridland.
Pop, soda or coke? The fizzy history behind America’s favorite linguistic debate
With burgers sizzling and classic rock thumping, many Americans revel in summer cookouts – at least until that wayward cousin asks for a “pop” in soda country, or even worse, a “coke” when they actually want a Sprite.
Few American linguistic debates have bubbled quite as long and effervescently as the one over whether a generic soft drink should be called a soda, pop, or coke.
The word you use generally boils down to where you’re from: Midwesterners enjoy a good pop, while soda is tops in the North and far West. Southerners, long the cultural mavericks, don’t bat an eyelash asking for coke – lowercase – before homing in on exactly the type they want: Perhaps a root beer or a Coke, uppercase.
As a linguist who studies American dialects, I’m less interested in this regional divide and far more fascinated by the unexpected history behind how a fizzy “health” drink from the early 1800s spawned the modern soft drink’s many names and iterations.
Foods and drinks with wellness benefits might seem like a modern phenomenon, but the urge to create drinks with medicinal properties inspired what might be called a soda revolution in the 1800s.
The process of carbonating water was first discovered in the late 1700s. By the early 1800s, this carbonated water had become popular as a health drink and was often referred to as “soda water.” The word “soda” likely came from “sodium,” since these drinks often contained salts, which were then believed to have healing properties.
Given its alleged curative effects for health issues such as indigestion, pharmacists sold soda water at soda fountains, innovative devices that created carbonated water to be sold by the glass. A chemistry professor, Benjamin Stillman, set up the first such device in a drugstore in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1806. Its eventual success inspired a boom of soda fountains in drugstores and health spas.
By the mid-1800s, pharmacists were creating unique root-, fruit- and herb-infused concoctions, such as sassafras-based root beer, at their soda fountains, often marketing them as cures for everything from fatigue to foul moods.
These flavored, sweetened versions gave rise to the linking of the word “soda” with a sweetened carbonated beverage, as opposed to simple, carbonated water.
Seltzer – today’s popular term for such sparkling water – was around, too. But it was used only for the naturally carbonated mineral water from the German town Nieder-Selters. Unlike Perrier, sourced similarly from a specific spring in France, seltzer made the leap to becoming a generic term for fizzy water.
So how did “soda” come to be called so many different things in different places?
It all stems from a mix of economic enterprise and linguistic ingenuity.
The popularity of “soda” in the Northeast likely reflects the soda fountain’s longer history in the region. Since a lot of Americans living in the Northeast migrated to California in the mid-to-late 1800s, the name likely traveled west with them.
As for the Midwestern preference for “pop” – well, the earliest American use of the term to refer to a sparkling beverage appeared in the 1840s in the name of a flavored version called “ginger pop.” Such ginger-flavored pop, though, was around in Britain by 1816, since a Newcastle songbook is where you can first see it used in text. The “pop” seems to be onomatopoeic for the noise made when the cork was released from the bottle before drinking.
Linguists don’t fully know why “pop” became so popular in the Midwest. But one theory links it to a Michigan bottling company, Feigenson Brothers Bottling Works – today known as Faygo Beverages – that used “pop” in the name of the sodas they marketed and sold. Another theory suggests that because bottles were more common in the region, soda drinkers were more likely to hear the “pop” sound than in the Northeast, where soda fountains reigned.
As for using coke generically, the first Coca-Cola was served in 1886 by Dr. John Pemberton, a pharmacist at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta and the founder of the company. In the 1900s, the Coca-Cola company tried to stamp out the use of “Coke” for “Coca-Cola.” But that ship had already sailed. Since Coca-Cola originated and was overwhelmingly popular in the South, its generic use grew out of the fact that people almost always asked for “Coke.”
As with Jell-O, Kleenex, Band-Aids and seltzer, it became a generic term.
Speaking of soft drinks, what’s up with that term?
It was originally used to distinguish all nonalcoholic drinks from “hard drinks,” or beverages containing spirits.
Interestingly, the original Coca-Cola formula included wine – resembling a type of alcoholic “health” drink popular overseas, Vin Mariani. But Pemberton went on to develop a “soft” version a few years later to be sold as a medicinal drink.
Due to the growing popularity of soda water concoctions, eventually “soft drink” came to mean only such sweetened carbonated beverages, a linguistic testament to America’s enduring love affair with sugar and bubbles.
With the average American guzzling almost 40 gallons per year, you can call it whatever you want. Just don’t call it healthy.
The segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." It originally appeared in The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license. You can find Valerie at valeriefridland.com.
When Q Stands Alone: Breaking the Q+U Rule
By Karen Lunde
Picture this: You're in an intense Scrabble showdown. You've got a Q tile burning a hole in your rack, but no U in sight. Game over?
Well, maybe not! There are a few English words that break the Q-followed-by-U rule, and some of them are definitely playable in a Scrabble match. But before I give you the Scrabble lowdown, let's talk about why Q and U usually hang out together in the first place.
You've probably learned since kindergarten that Q and U stick together like peanut butter and jelly in most English words. But did you know that it's a relationship that goes back thousands of years? The story of Q+U is kind of a linguistic game of hot potato, with letters and sounds passed from one language's alphabet to the next.
The letter Q traces back to the ancient Semitic letter ["cough"] spelled Q-O-P-H (or Q-O-P), which represented something linguists might call a "voiceless uvular stop" — that's a sound made at the back of the mouth. The Phoenicians passed this letter to the Greeks, who adapted it as qoppa but later dropped it from their standard alphabet because they didn't need a /kw/ sound. The Etruscans adopted and used it specifically in combination with U to represent the /kw/ sound in Latin, distinguishing it from C and K, and they passed it on to the Romans. That's why a significant number of our Q+U words stem from Latin.
So, in English, Q and U are like partners that almost always hang out together. The Q makes a /k/ sound, and the U adds the /w/ sound right after it. Together, they create that distinctive /kw/ sound we hear in words like "queen," "quick," and "question."
This pairing became so standard that English speakers came to expect it. When Q appears without U, it feels weird because we've been conditioned to expect Q and U to show up together.
Now, here's the Scrabble advantage I promised! Memorizing these Q-without-U words could change your strategy forever:
QI (pronounced "chee"): This two-letter word — spelled Q-I — refers to the vital life force in Chinese philosophy. It's just two letters worth a whopping 11 points in Scrabble! So, that tiny word can be a game-changer if you play it on a double or triple word score.
Next is QAID ["caid"]: That's Q-A-I-D. This word refers to a Muslim leader or chieftain in North Africa. With a couple of common vowels in its makeup, this is one of those sneaky words you can often play off a word already on the board.
Next is QIVIUT ["kee-vee-uht"]: I love this one! Q-I-V-I-U-T. It's the soft underwool of the Arctic muskox. Imagine the look on your opponent's face when you play this six-letter word across a triple word score.
Next is FAQIR ["fuh-KIER"]: You may have heard this one before. Spelled F-A-Q-I-R, it refers to a Muslim or Hindu religious ascetic.
And a few Scrabble dictionaries may accept these outliers:
QWERTY — spelled Q-W-E-R-T-Y, and always in all caps — represents the standard English-language typing keyboard layout, named for the first six letters on the top row of the keyboard. Dictionaries like Merriam-Webster include "QWERTY" as a word, but you might not find it in certain Scrabble dictionaries.
A zaddiq — spelled Z-A-D-D-I-Q — is a Hasidic Jewish spiritual leader or a saintly, righteous person in the Jewish faith. This one's kind of a cheat! The common spelling is Z-A-D-D-I-K, but some Scrabble dictionaries accept the alternate spelling that ends in Q.
So, If you're relying on a standard or older Scrabble dictionary, you might not find "QWERTY" and "zaddiq." But if you're using an online source like scrabblewordfinder.org just for fun, you're good to go.
Now, let's talk about the Q-without-U words English borrows from other languages that play by different rules. When English borrows these words, it often keeps their original spelling.
In Mandarin Chinese (written in pinyin), Q represents a completely different sound than in English — something closer to "ch" but made with the tongue in a different position.
"Qi" is the Scrabble word we talked about earlier. In Chinese medicine, it's believed to flow through pathways in your body called meridians.
Qigong ["chee-gung"] — Q-I-G-O-N-G — is a system of coordinated movements, breathing, and meditation designed to enhance qi flow and improve health. It's similar to tai chi but with more focus on the movement of energy.
And Arabic has a letter that's traditionally written as Q when it's converted to our alphabet. It represents a deep throaty sound … that I won't be trying to replicate for you today. Here are a few words that use it:
Burqa — B-U-R-Q-A — is a full-body covering worn by some Muslim women that includes a mesh screen over the eyes.
Qat ["cot," like the thing you sleep on] — spelled Q-A-T — is a flowering plant native to East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. People sometimes chew its leaves as a stimulant during social gatherings in countries like Yemen.
And A qadi ["cah-dee"] — spelled Q-A-D-I — is a judge who makes decisions according to Islamic law.
Place names also often preserve their original spellings when adopted into English. Here are a few places around the globe that break the Q+U rule.
The capital city of Nunavut in northern Canada is Iqaluit ["EE-cal-oo-iht"]. There's a U in this word, but not after the Q — it's I-Q-A-L-U-I-T. The city's named for an Inuit word meaning "place of many fish."
These rare Q words tell us something important about language — it's constantly borrowing and adapting, like a collector who travels the world, bringing home treasures from other languages and cultures. Each exception to the rule is like a little souvenir from a different part of the world.
That segment was written by Karen Lunde, a career writer and editor. In the late '90s, as a young mom with two kids and a dog, she founded one of the internet's first writing workshop communities. These days, she facilitates expressive writing workshops, both online and off. Find her at chanterellestorystudio.com.
Finally, I have a familect story from Jamie:
Hi, Grammar Girl. My name is Jamie, and I'm here to share my story of my fiancé's family's weird lingo. So the first one, the most entertaining one that I can think of right now, is that the ends of the pizza, the bread crust after you're done eating your pizza. If you don't want to finish it, it's called a pizza bone. To my knowledge, this originated because they had a family dog growing up, and the dog would get the ends of the pizza, and the pizza was shaped, the ends of the pizza was shaped like a dog's bone. So that's my story. Thanks for listening.
Thanks for the call, Jamie! That was one lucky dog.
Do you, dear listeners, have a familect story? If so, I'd love to hear it, and so would everyone else. Send me a recording of a made-up word you use only with your family or friends leaving a message on the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL or leaving a voice message on WhatsApp. Be sure to call from somewhere quiet, and if you want that number or link later, they're in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast, and we have lots of other shows. Tomorrow, Nutrition Diva has a show about resistant starches. Here's a little clip:
But your saliva also contains small amounts of an enzyme called amylase, which starts to break down starch the moment you begin chewing. I remember doing a fun experiment in fifth grade that demonstrated this in a very memorable way. You can even try it at home with your kids: Chew a plain-unsalted saltine cracker for long enough and it will start to taste faintly sweet. You’re literally tasting the starch being broken down into sugar on your tongue.
That episode drops tomorrow, and again, that's the Nutrition Diva.
Thanks to Dan Feierabend in audio; Morgan Christianson in advertising; Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts; and Nat Hoopes in Marketing, who has two cats named Meelo and Seashell, and Meelo is almost 18 years old!
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip-a-day book "The Grammar Daily." That's all. Thanks for listening.