Earlier this year, i was listening to Rollie and Tiller chatting at the table while I was fixing dinner. They spoke the same word at the same time:
Rollie said, “Jinx! You owe me a soda!”
Me, aghast: “Rollie! Where did you hear that? You sound like a Yankee! We don’t say, ‘soda!’ We say, ‘Coke!’ It’s “Jinx, you owe me a Coke!”
R. shrugs, then: “That’s not what we say at school. . . “
Don’t even get me started on the other things they don’t do at school. . . but that’s a different post.
So, this Atlantic article quickly caught my eye: “Do you say ‘pop,’ ‘soda,’ or ‘Coke?’ Which sports team do you call your own?”
Coke. Braves.
Let’s just say that I’m endlessly fascinated by regional differences in the United States. Partly because I am just naturally interested in the evolution of dialect; the crazy idioms and sayings in the South are continually charming and interesting to me. I think it may have roots in those first days living in Fairport, New York. We moved there from Alpharetta, Georgia, the summer after I finished first grade. I thought I was moving to New York City. In the 70s, I think this meant to me that everyone listened to Blondie, and had switchblades and you would get mugged if you weren’t careful. have started with the ridicule and ribbing I received when we I thought that my “southerness” was under fire as a kid, with all the people I grew up with in Atlanta whose parents weren’t Southerners. However, it has really hit home since having kids. But with my own kids, it seems almost NONE of their friends’ parents are Southern. For the most part, I think we are more similar than different, but there are some glaring differences in the way we think, and the way we do things. Coke versus Pop and Soda is just a symptom of something much larger. In Atlanta, home of Coca Cola, so much of what is Southern has been lost; What is left is just kitsch. One has to seek out things that are authentically Southern in Atlanta, and wade through a lot of stuff that is simply someone’s idea of what is Southern. That being said, it only takes a short drive to find the authentic once again.
Another interesting read for me was Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.
Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers
The book generally deals with “outliers” – those who excel or are most successful, the high achievers of the world. But there was one chapter that dealt with The Culture of Honor. We read it in my book club, and it was interesting to me that two of us were fascinated by this chapter, because it mirrored our backgrounds. We are both Southerners, although i am from Atlanta, and she is from small-town Virginia. Those of other backgrounds found it interesting, but it didn’t seem to strike as much of a chord with them.
I’m such a nerd about this subject that I am currently reading this:
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America
From Library Journal
This cultural history explains the European settlement of the United States as voluntary migrations from four English cultural centers. Families of zealous, literate Puritan yeomen and artisans from urbanized East Anglia established a religious community in Massachusetts (1629-40); royalist cavaliers headed by Sir William Berkeley and young, male indentured servants from the south and west of England built a highly stratified agrarian way of life in Virginia (1640-70); egalitarian Quakers of modest social standing from the North Midlands resettled in the Delaware Valley and promoted a social pluralism (1675-1715); and, in by far the largest migration (1717-75), poor borderland families of English, Scots, and Irish fled a violent environment to seek a better life in a similarly uncertain American backcountry. These four cultures, reflected in regional patterns of language, architecture, literacy, dress, sport, social structure, religious beliefs, and familial ways, persisted in the American settlements. The final chapter shows the significance of these regional cultures for American history up to the present.
– David Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
I’m still reading the first “folkway,” about the Puritans. Fascinating reading. Just last night, I read out loud to Todd the portion about a man in 1700’s New Haven, Connecticut. This unfortunate man was missing an eye. He worked for a family that owned a pig. The pig gave birth to piglet with only one eye. The people of New Haven were so appalled by sexual deviation that they hanged this man, because obviously, he had participated in Bestiality, procreating with the pig to create an eyeless piglet!
You can’t make stuff like that up. Fascinating! I am sure I will become insufferable upon reading the “folkways” section that deals with those who settled in the American back country from war torn English, Scots, and Irish borders. Todd, consider yourself warned.
Geez. I have no idea where I’m going with this; Truly the most incoherent post ever. I am like Ashley Wilkes, sadly pining for a lost way of life that is Gone With the Wind. And let’s be frank – I certainly don’t hold up the south as some glorious, shining example of high culture or enlightenment. I am not proud of its bloody, racist history, it’s illiteracy, and it’s crazy ass religious fervor. And I’m sure as hell not complaining about living near Bagel Palace, or about having the world’s menu just outside my doorstep on Buford Highway. But, I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Being a Southerner often informs who I am in many parts of my life. I’m all for separation of church and state, but yet, I feel that I understand why Christians, and southern Christians in particular, feel persecuted. (I know I am gonna get reamed for this one, but i do sympathize with them.) It makes my blood boil when I read national articles about the American South that seem so misguided and ill-informed. I cringe at depictions of Southerner in film and on TV.
I often wonder if people from other regions feel that dire need to know where they came from, and to hold on to it’s ways of life. Why is that so important to me as a Southerner? Because it is vanishing? Because so many people would like to see it change? Is it because my brother-in-law thinks that my sister and I aren’t really Southern because we grew up in Atlanta? It is true. I don’t have longstanding roots in Atlanta. Daddy left Savannah, and Mama left Chattanooga. I didn’t live in some house, much less town, that all four of my grandparents lived in, and their parents, too. And sometimes I wonder if I am missing a piece of the puzzle that truly does make one Southern.
But I know, too, that some things are intangible, and that you can take a girl out of a place, but she is still a product of those who raised her, and the places that informed them. I guess I just want to hold on to who I am, and where I came from. That “where” might not even be a geographical place as much as an attitude, and a deference for certain ways that things ought to be done. And I want some of those same things that make me Southern to inform my children – I want them to be proud of where they came from, to have a deeper understanding of their backgrounds than what they see in media.
And damn it, I want them to write Thank You notes, love friend green tomatoes and boiled peanut, and say “Yes M’am,” and “Jinx, you owe me a Coke!”
Course, my Grandma probably wished that I would say, “Co’Cola.”
So, where are you from? Coke, Pop, or Soda? And what baseball team do you pull for? I’m genuinely curious.