Jul 9th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Endgame
Wait: Michael Jackson died? How come nobody covered that?
— In defense of street cleaning tickets.
— The famous soda/pop/coke map.
— All about race, roommates, and prejudice.
— Fun with seasonal adjustment of labor market statistics.
— Pros and cons of the House Democrats’ surtax proposal.
Song of the day, Sunset Rubdown “Idiot Heart”.
46 Responses to “Endgame”
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July 9th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
So apparently a shift in Pop voters triggered by Barack Obama’s leading the ticket for a deeply Soda-based party triggered November’s election. Since Clinton, the previous generation’s Soda/Coke alliance has splintered. We call this the “Southern Strategy.”
July 9th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
We call this the “Southern Strategy.”
Would that be Mountain Dew?
July 9th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
It’s ‘pop.’ But you have to say it correctly. It’s close to ‘pap’ for you coastal-types.
July 9th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Wow, New Mexico is all over the place on soda/pop/coke. What is “other”?
July 9th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Sunset Rubdown seem pretty decent. Like Interpol with a dash of something more histrionic, like Arcade Fire or Joy Division.
July 9th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
tsk tsk, matt. You copy Ezra Klein’s end-of-day links idea, and now you’re even using his jokes inside those posts?
July 9th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
How do you treat a racist like Lonewacko?
When he says brown folks want to bring him down?
How do make it clear that he’s a nutjob?
A Birther Young-Earther! A bigoted crank! A clown!
July 9th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Matthew forgot to mention that the Obama Administration reacted in panic to my scathing criticism two days ago and mounted a desperate media campaign today to assure the nation that the Swine Flu response now has their full attention:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090709/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_swine_flu
PS I got my Digital TV rebate coupons (to replace the expired ones) so I’m feeling benevolent and gracious at the moment.
July 9th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Where I grew up, the whole soda/pop/coke debate was sort of nonsensical. You’d ask a general question, “would you like a drink?” and the person would answer back with a specific, “yeah, do you have any 7-up?” Rarely was there a need (or a use) for a word limiting the options to a sugary carbonated beverage without specifying which one in particular. If there was, we’re just as likely to say “soft drink” as anything else. Since we definitely never said pop or coke (which both sound very weird to me), I tend to answer that I say “soda” although I think I rarely use that word. I just would never say the other two, so its soda by default, but I’ve never liked being labeled as that.
Whenever I am somewhere and someone does offer me a “pop” it makes me feel rude if in fact I’d prefer water or juice or something not “pop”. Why can’t I just be offered a drink?
Its like saying, “I feel like a cured meat sandwich.” Either go with the general, “sandwich” or a specific, “i’d really like a salami sandwich.” The whole need for a vague intermediary term always bothered me.
July 9th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Thank you! Can we PLEASE put to bed the “tonic” thing?
Nobody calls it “tonic.” Nobody has called it “tonic” for several decades.
July 9th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Joy Division or Arcade Fire? How about Mozart or Dead Kennedys?
@Nylund I think it’s a way of finding out if the person wants something poppish without running through all the options (Vernors, or Squirt, or Green River). If the person wants milk, it may not be economical to go through all the individual types of pop you have when ascertaining the type of drink the person wants.
July 9th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
In the midwest it was pop; now I just ask for a beer–imported.
July 9th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
@Joe From Lowell
‘Tonic’ is coming back:
http://www.elixirtonics.com/
There’s one on Melrose in LA.
(That’s where the hipsters are.)
July 9th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
My air conditioner goes out a few weeks ago and a repair man comes out to fix it. As I’m sweating just watching him figure out what’s wrong with my AC I begin to ponder that it must suck to be an air conditioner repair guy because every place you go has no AC. So I ask the guy, “Can I get you something to drink? Would you like a water or a coke or something?”
He responds, “Sure, whatdya got?”
I say, “Coke, IBC Root Bear, Orange Crush, and green Gatorade.” (Does anybody say Gatorade Fierce or Gatorade Rain? WTF is up with the flavors there?)
He says, “I’ll have a Coke, thanks.”
I personally find pop to be a jarring word. It’s hard on the ears. Really, the less spoken the better.
July 9th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
[...] “Wait: Michael Jackson died? How come nobody covered that?” –Matthew Yglesias [...]
July 9th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
It really doesn’t matter what word you use, as long as people understand you… oh, wait, they say “coke” in the South?? Isn’t that name taken by, you know, Coke?
Leave it to Southerners to do the stupid thing when an infinite number of non-stupid choices are available.
July 9th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
Growing up in Michigan, I had a friend originally from Cincinnati, and I used to ride him mercilessly every time he ordered something like “an orange coke”.
Then I went to college on the East Coast, and discovered the pop/soda thing the hard way. I felt kinda bad in retrospect.
Anyway, CAP says:
If a surtax is seriously being considered by Congress, it makes little sense to simultaneously dismiss the proposals to limit deductions or cap benefits out of hand.
Yeah, little sense until you consider politics. As I said in other thread, get the darn thing passed with a robust public option, and then down the road it will be much easier to optimize funding.
Finally, on initial jobs claims: seasonal adjustments can be misleading, but so can unadjusted numbers–no one said econometrics was going to be easy. In general, I think it helps to follow the advice of Calculated Risk and look at the 4-week moving average.
July 9th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Mark,
It is like asking for a xerox or a kleenex.
July 9th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
@joe from Lowell,
I dunno, I have family out in rural MA, and let me tell you Tonic is alive and well out there.
July 9th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
“In defense of street cleaning tickets.”
I must be some kind of thief. I watched those things for years without tickets. As entertaining as they are I still think I prefer stadium and casino demolitions.
July 9th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
soda is carbonated water
pop is flavored carbonated water
How hard is this for you Americans to understand?
July 9th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
Re Tonic: In my freshman year at Hahvahd in ‘88 I had exactly one person say to me, “Pop? Oh you mean tonic.” So it’s only been gone for two decades at most.
Re New Mexico: I think a lot of the results there are due to small sample size; if you look at the county-by-county listings you can see that almost all the counties with double-digit responses mostly said “Coke,” and the dark green county had one single respondent who said “Other.”
The thing that really confuses me is the “soda” islands around St. Louis and Milwaukee. Why? Is it correlated with beer brewing?
July 9th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
It really doesn’t matter what word you use, as long as people understand you… oh, wait, they say “coke” in the South?? Isn’t that name taken by, you know, Coke?
Leave it to Southerners to do the stupid thing when an infinite number of non-stupid choices are available.
As someone who grew up in Georgia: the Coke headquarters is in Atlanta. Thus virtually every restaurant has Coke and not Pepsi products, and the vast majority of people have Coke and not Pepsi in their fridge. Due to its popularity it became common to ask your guest “can I get you a Coke or something?” and then you say “sure, a Diet Coke (or Sprite or Dr. Pepper or whatever)”. Of course most of the time you just ask someone if they’d like something to drink. It’s really not as confusing as it sounds.
July 9th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Matt, do you support the escalation of the war in AF-PAK, and if so, do you have any plans on joining the Corp to get your kill on?
July 9th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
joe from Lowell: Probably, but on that map Greater Boston has its “soda” numbers drop from 80-100% to 50-80%, which leads me to think that the elderly holdovers who still call it “tonic” are enough to be statistically significant. (Since I can’t think of any other reason for that to happen, and it’s too neat a pattern for me think it’s a coincidence.)
July 9th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
Hey, is there any explanation of why a given region calls a soft drink by a particular term?
Is it ethno-regional in nature or is it based on sheer marketing and branding history of soft drinks in given regions, from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries?
July 9th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
[Singing]:
I dreamed I saw Michael Jackson last night,
Alive as you and me.
Says I “But Michael, you’re ten days dead”
“I never died” said he,
“I never died” said he.
July 9th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Street cleaning tickets are in-fucking-defensible!!!!! 100 dollars for a street cleaner that doesn’t actually come to my neighborhood!?!? WTF!?!
Sorry. I’m calm.
Very calm.
July 9th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Not to burst anyone’s bubble, but it’s possible to click on any state on the pop/soda map and get to a chart showing the actual number of respondents, which are in my opinion disappointingly small.
In the case of New Mexico: the only counties with sufficiently large numbers of responders to produce a meaningful sample were Los Alamos, Santa Fe, Bernalillo (Albuquerque) and Dona Ana (adjoining El Paso and containing NMSU). All four of which have a very high proportion of residents who moved there from elsewhere in the US and, presumably, brought the appropriate names for fizzy flavored water with them.
July 9th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
Matthew, good choice on Sunset Rubdown, but why not “Shut Up I Am Dreaming Of Places Where Lovers Have Wings”?
July 9th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
Regarding what term people use for soda.I have found that when I am riding my bicycle through some of the small towns in lower and western Pennsylvania that the generic name for soda is Pepsi.
I think that Pepsi cannot compete in the big markets with Coke so they ttry to dominate the small towns.Which is why you will get a Coke at a bar in Philadelphia, but a Pepsi in Myersdale PA [population 2,000 ,and a great town].
I do not know if Pepsi dominates the small town restaraunts in the rest of the country. But it certainly seems to in the area between York and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.
July 10th, 2009 at 12:03 am
How hard is this for you Americans to understand?
Too harsh: allow room for “fizzy drink”, “fizzy pop” or the Hegelian synthesis that is “soda-pop”.
July 10th, 2009 at 12:27 am
Well, but that’s Cincinnati. They think chili contains noodles, too.
July 10th, 2009 at 12:41 am
Regarding the unemployment figures in the NPR story.
As many here already know , most unemployment figures leave out a large amount of people.Such as people that have ran out of benifits or people who do not qaulify bacause they did not work at their last job long enough to qaulify.It also does not count the many people that may have been working ” off the books”.There are a lot of American born day laborers unfortuantly .
Not to mention the “underemployed” such as myself at the moment.
I am not saying that I have a better way to count the unemployed.Probably no one does.But I do think that when reading unemployment figures we should all realise that there defintily is a large under count.
July 10th, 2009 at 7:12 am
Is there a map delineating the “jimmies/sprinkles” breakdown by region (i.e., the chocolate or rainbow-colored topping on ice cream)?
Lisa
July 10th, 2009 at 8:25 am
Joe from Lowell,
I do know some people from MA who call it ‘tonic’, it tends to be restricted to older people. I’ve heard that in areas of rural northern NE there are still a fair number of people who say ‘tonic’.
I like the term Tonic and I hope it does come back.
July 10th, 2009 at 9:16 am
Is there a map delineating the “jimmies/sprinkles” breakdown by region
I’ve never thought that was a regional thing. It was always my understanding that “jimmies” is the term of art and “sprinkles” is the layman’s term, the same way that the tip of a shoelace is properly called an “aglet,” but a lot of people call it a “nib.”
July 10th, 2009 at 10:00 am
a regional variant — my grandfather (Johnson County, Texas, just south of “Forth” Worth) said “Co-Cola” generically
July 10th, 2009 at 11:20 am
I’d be interested in how the survey was worded. It shows the county in the mid/South West where I grew up going overwhelmingly using “pop”, but I can tell you that it’s really called “soda pop” by almost everyone there.
And, in response to Nyland@9, until about the late 80’s, what most people meant by “soda pop” was any one of a dozen (mostly fruit like orange, grape, etc) flavors of some locally-produced carbonated beverage. Coke, Pepsi, 7-Up, etc, weren’t all that dominant.
July 10th, 2009 at 11:21 am
The map looks a little misleading, living here in Northeast Tennessee, close to the Virginia boarder. I work in Southwest Virginia and have yet to here anyone call a coke ‘pop’ (a lot of old-timers call it ‘Co-Cola’). Yet the map shows that ‘pop’ is the more prevalent usage in all but one county (Scott) in that portion of that state. If anything, you’ll hear someone say soda before they would pop, but 99 percent of the time people use the word coke (or sprite for lemon-lime drinks, etc). The only exception is Mountain Dew. It gets called by its proper name, but originated in this area anyway.
July 10th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Everyone in my neighborhood in suburban Los Angeles called them “soft drinks”.
July 10th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Everyone in my neighborhood in suburban Los Angeles called them “soft drinks”.
That does seem to be the West Coast norm.
Although, disturbingly for me, the entirety of Canada seems to have replicated all the lingo straight from the Midwest. The pop/sode thing is true throughout Canada as it is in the Midwest.
July 10th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
I like the term Tonic and I hope it does come back.
That doesn’t surprise me, Hector. You also like Christianity and you hope it comes back. And you like Marxism and you hope it comes back.
July 10th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
From Boston and my dad and grandmother definitely still say “tonic.” Also, until very recently, the Star Market near my childhood home had on its sign over the aisles “Tonic” and “Diet Tonic.”
July 10th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Also, the reason New Mexico, Florida and Alaska look so weird are partially because they’re all areas with lots of migrants from other parts of the country, and also because they have a lot on non-English speakers (Latinos in the South, native Alaskans in central Alaska).
July 10th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Knowing you, Hector, you’re probably hoping the Latin term comes back.