When my daughter was just starting to talk, a bit younger than 2 years old, she put together two words that she understood, "bubble" and "juice," and called any carbonated sweet drink "bubble juice." I thought that this was very clever and remarked how smart kids are to make their limited tool set work extra hard for them.

Shortly after that, I heard someone else's two-year-old call it bubble juice, and I realized that obviously the same thing had happened ... the kids love juice, love bubble baths, and take those words to describe a new experience. I now keep an ear open whenever I'm around kids, to hear what they call things that are new to them.

Btw, I'm from Michigan, and it seems that anyone born here calls it "pop," but we have a lot of transplants from a bit further south, and they all call it "soda."

Also, when I lived in New Bern, North Carolina, the birth place of Pepsi, everyone there called any carbonated sweet beverage "Pepsi."

After seeing from this thread how Scots and Peruvians call it the dominant selling brand from their area, I remember that in Germany everyone called it a "limonade," or a "lemonaid" in English.

It seems to me that this is the same as calling an adhesive bandage a "band-aid," or a paper tissue "kleenex." When I lived in England I was very confused at first when someone asked me to "hoover" the carpet, but I quickly realized that Hoover must have been the leading brand of vacuum cleaner in the U.K. for a time, and the noun had become a verb.

Well, I've got to go back to "Delling" my application.

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