COKE in the South

[David Bowie]

From:    RonButters at AOL.COM
: In a message dated 3/2/05 9:46:09 PM, stalker at MSU.EDU writes:

:: I like this. Southerners, who use Coke generically,(note those
:: non-restrictive clause commas) are aware of the legal sense of the
:: term and are rejecting it. Does this correlate with the "save your
:: Dixie cups; the South will rise again syndrome?

<snip>

: JIm's nonrestrictive clause commas are wrong, but it would be
: difficult to maintain that the shorthand use of "cokes" by SOME
: Southerners sometimes borders on the generic. In my experience after
: living nearly 40 years in North Carolina (I haven't checked this
: against any empirical data), there are SOME people who use
: "cokes" (almost always in the plural) to refer to soft drinks
: in general, though they are fading out in areas where the large number
: of immigrants from the North are often confused by such utterances as,
: "What kind of cokes do y'all have?" Most frequently, it seems to me,
: there use is plural.

<snip for bandwidth>

: ...Sometimes words do indeed undergo what the
: lawyers call GENERICIDE, and maybe COKE has done this for some
: people: COKE(S) may have some kind of double-meaning for some people,
: i.e., a dictionary that properly describes COKE for some Southerners
: might should have entry #1 for the trademark status and #2 for the
: generic use. But such people are a decided minority in the US, and I
: suspect that they are dying out in the face of dialect mixture and,
: of course, modern advertising...

Agreed that the nonrestrictive clause bit was wrong (very wrong, in fact,
IMObservation), but, that said...

I'm not so sure that the use of COKE you discuss is dying out, since *i*'m
one of these people (with a meaning #1 for COKE [note the singular!] of
'Coca-Cola' and a meaning #2 of 'sweetened carbonated beverage'), and i'm
only 34. I'm from Southern Maryland, pretty much as far north as you can get
and still hear (semi-?)generic COKE (yes, that's COKE in the singular), and
in my fieldwork there, you get occasional COKE as a generic from respondents
of all ages.

It might be worthwhile looking at the possible parallel of PEPSI as,
perhaps, a generic for sweetened carbonated beverages in parts of Idaho and
(i think) Montana, and maybe elsewhere.

<snip>

David Bowie                                         http://pmpkn.net/lx
    Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
    house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
    chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.