Nice little observation from Jeff Jacoby.

Jeff Jacoby: Musing, random and otherwise:

One of the dividing lines in my home is linguistic. I eat supper, sit on the couch, and hand my wife her purse. She eats dinner, sits on the sofa, and carries a pocketbook. Somehow we manage to communicate across this terminological gulf, but our differences are a reminder that Americans don't speak one language.

The point is beautifully illustrated by Matthew T. Campbell's map of generic names for soft drinks, which is posted at www.popvssoda.com. I grew up drinking pop in Ohio; my wife is a confirmed soda drinker from New York State. Somehow we ended up in Boston, where many natives still refer to any carbonated beverage as tonic. Then there are all those Southerners who say coke, even if they're drinking Orange Crush.

'How can anyone govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?' Charles De Gaulle once groused about the French. Something similar can be said about Americans. If we cannot even agree on the word for soft drink, is it any surprise that we're not 'one nation indivisible' when it comes to politics and values either?