This is a pretty neat project. I always either say "soft drink" or refer to the actual brand name of the drink I'm referring to. "Pop" and "soda" both sound goofy to my and referring to other brands as "Coke" is just wrong.

I say "soda" and I think "pop" sounds goofy. This is consistent with what the map says about the Philadelphia area, where I grew up. But either one beats using "coke" (or "cola", a common write-in vote on the site) as a catch-all term, which is demonstrably wrong.

This is a well-executed project. I would like to see it used for similar questions, e.g. "sub" vs. "hoagie" vs. "hero", etc. But it seems like it's putting a big strain on their server.

Yeah, this is a fairly standard linguistic survey. I looked at the results for a lot of these at university. When they're all mapped out, they tend to look like weather maps...

I said "pop" for the longest time and then trained myself to say "soda," which is what I say now. I concur with Brad on using "Coke" to define all soft drinks. That's just wacky.

And we say 'sub' around here, short for 'submarine sandwich'. They said 'hoagie' on the Cosby Show when I was growing up, which I always found confusing.

I just realized that I refer to all tissue as 'Kleenex', which is a brand name. In fact I'm not even sure what you call it other than Kleenex. Nasal tissue? I'll have to go look at the box.

"Facial tissue" I believe. Same goes for Band-Aids, don't you know.

Yeah, they're just "tissues" over here in Australia.

I wish I could remember the technical term for the transition of a brand name into a generic noun. Although we Australians have photocopies and tissues, rather than xeroxes and kleenexes, we have Glad Wrap (cling wrap or cling film), textas (felt-tip pens), Panadol (paracetamol), Walkman, and a bunch of others. I have never been able to work out if companies would be happy about this change, or annoyed by it.

I use non-brand-specific names whenever possible (tissues, photocopies, etc.), with some exceptions like "Walkman" and "Thermos" -- although the latter may be forgivable since I'm almost always referring to actual Thermos-brand flasks.

I say "hoagie", but I'm pretty sure that's [url=http://citypaper.net/articles/070695/article020.shtml]a Philadelphia thing[/url]. I don't use the word to refer to sandwiches with hot fillings -- bread and meatballs, for example, are either a meatball sandwich or a meatball sub. And now that I've moved out of the Philly area, I always say "sub" when ordering a hoagie, to avoid confusion.

Facial tissue, right. I should have remembered that.

I was looking up the origin of the name hero sandwich:

Hero is the name given in the New York area to the kind of sandwich known in other parts of the country variously as 'grinder,' 'poor boy,' 'submarine' and 'hoagie.'

Poor boy? Grinder? Say what?

A "Po' Boy" is a Louisiana thing. I found a restaurant in Pennsylvania once that claimed to serve po' boys, and they were good, though I can't attest to the authenticity. My perception is that a po' boy is also slightly different from a generic sub. I think it's required to be hot and contain some sort of meat. But I could be mistaken.

I've seen "grinder" before, but always in conjunction with some other term, as if the restaurant were trying to cater to some myterious demographic who knows no other term [i]but[/i] grinder for such sandwiches. I've never heard anyone use the term in conversation.

Searching around a bit more I found this interesting Database of American Proprietary Eponyms.

Great link, Brad.

Maybe "eponymy" was the term I was trying to recall...

Soft drink sounds dorky to me, around here we usualy say Soda and call the sandwich a Sub.

I think a grinder is a glorified Sub made in an italian restaurant with meat or something.