Grammar Girl here. I'm Injohn 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're going to look at where you can use a queue without a you.

But first, thanks to the listeners who got in touch to tell me how to pronounce the

Russian word for bread that is spelled X-L-E-B.

Apparently, the X is pronounced like an H, so it's more like, Helleb.

And this next segment is by linguist Valerie Friedland.

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 to sprite.

Few American linguistic debates have bubbled quite as long and as 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 a Coke, lowercase, before homing in on exactly what

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 drinks 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

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