DCHP-2

pop DCHP-2 (October 2016)

• n. — Food & Drink

  any carbonated, sweetened, non-alcoholic beverage (e.g. Coke, Pepsi, Sprite, ginger ale).

  Type: 5. Frequency — Pop is the most common generic term for carbonated beverages in Canada, with the exception of Quebec (see soft drink and Chambers & Heisler 1999:42-43, Boberg 2010: 178 and passim). The OED-3 (s.v. "pop" (n.1 (6)), 1812 quotation) shows the term is originally British and suggests that the name originates from the sound made when the cork leaves the bottle. As Image 1 shows, from the 2004 Harvard Dialect Survey of the United States, soda is the majority variant there, with pop a distant second. The function of pop in Canada is quite different. Boberg (2010: 172) writes:
  "The frequency of pop reaches 100 percent in interior British Columbia, over 90 percent across the Maritimes (despite its absence across the border in New England), and over 85 percent in southern Ontario, Alberta and Vancouver-Victoria".
  Its main competitor in Canada is soft drink, which is used "both in and outside Montreal (73 percent), where pop is rare (4 percent). Soft drink also intrudes on the dominion of pop in Manitoba (32 percent), eastern Ontario (38 percent) and Newfoundland (27 percent), though pop is somewhat stronger in these regions."
  Despite US distributions as shown in Image 1, pop must therefore be considered the prime Canadian variant outside Quebec. As Boberg (2010: 173) further shows, soda, "the main term in the northeastern and southwestern United States, and coke [used generically as the term for any carbonated sweet beverage], the main variant in the American South, enjoy virtually no currency in Canada," unless in their specialized meanings (i.e. as a term for for soda water.) Pop is significant in Canada due to its dominance in most of the country, while the term most prevalent in the northeastern and southwestern US, soda, has virtually no currency in Canada (see Boberg 2010).

  See also: soft drink  

  • As the 1932 quotation demonstrates, pop has a long history in Canada.