Soda beats Coke; Where's pop?

Somebody has too much time on their hands. It's probably me. Come to think of it, if you're reading this, it's probably you:

Order a soda in Michigan or Minnesota and you're clearly an outsider. Ask for pop in New York City and you risk being ridiculed.

Bert Vaux, a linguistics professor at Harvard University, says many Americans are overly passionate about how they refer to the popular beverage family.

The pop-soda-Coke divide has always created vague, and usually incorrect, assumptions about who says what where, Vaux said.

But for the first time, Internet technology -- and 29,000 votes on a Web site -- has offered a definition of the debate's borders.

The site, created eight years ago as a college project, asks visitors to enter their childhood zip code and the soft drink term they use. Their vote is then placed on a map as a colored dot [green for "pop", red for "Coke" and blue for "soda"].

Who's winning? It's, um, bottle neck and neck. Pop and soda each have about 11,300 votes, or 39 percent. Coke has about 4,800 votes.

...and Florida splits almost right in half between saying Coke and soda.