Want a coke with that?

It’s a scene I’ve seen played out thousands of times.

“Y’all want something to drink?”

“Yeah, gimme a coke.”

“What kind?”

“Dr Pepper.”



Down in Texas, many of us who grew up here (perhaps not the millions who have moved in during the past couple of decades) tend to call every soft drink a coke.

It applies even to Dr Pepper, the Texas-born soft drink that once advertised itself as “not a cola or a root beer.” In fact, we’ll call a root beer a coke.

Why? I don’t know, but I suppose Coke was the first big name in the soft drink category and just became a catch-all, like using Thermos for any insulated bottle or Dumpster for any large garbage bin.

What if we really want a Coke?

It’s simple, “Gimme a Coca-Cola.”

(We need not venture into the result of corporate mergers and takeovers that has produced the oft-heard response, “Is Pepsi OK?”)

I grew up working in my dad’s grocery store in Greggton and learned at a young age people called things by different names. Most people would reference the selection of bottled drinks (no cans yet and fountain drinks were available only in restaurants) as cokes or soft drinks, but there were a couple of noted exceptions.

Most of our black customers referred to them as soda water: “Where’s your soda water?”

The other reference was to pop. Anyone who asked for pop, I always assumed to be a Yankee.

Of course, there are other ways to determine someone’s not from Texas.

I visited the other day with a woman who started complaining about the heat. This was late March or early April, mind you, and the temperature was probably in the 70s.

“I don’t know how you can stand it down here,” she said. “It’s so hot and humid.”

“No, ma’am, it doesn’t really get hot here until July and then it kinda overdoes it in August just a tad.”

Come to find out, she’s from eastern Washington state. (I’ve always pitied people from the Evergreen State to a degree because they always have to qualify it as Washington “state.” It is a distinction worth making, however.) In return, I complained to her about a week we spent on Long Beach Peninsula, Washington, in June and it did not warm above the 50s.

She was in Texas for her son’s wedding and planned to return home right away. Odds are she will leave Texas to us, just as I gladly leave Washington to those who enjoy the cold.

She also took issue with the shortage of trees. I did educate her on the Piney Woods of East Texas and put in a pitch for the diversity offered here.

Thankfully, she did not make any comment about how we talk, though I likely dropped in an extra “y’all” or two and drawled out my vowels a little more than usual. It’s something I tend to do when entertaining foreigners.

It’s warmed up enough now, I’m fixin’ to mosey on over to the corner store and fetch me a coke. Y’all want anything?

(c) 2010 by Steve Martaindale