Pop Politics

Is your party alignment really dependent upon what you call a carbonated beverage? Just a little bit.

While up late eating everything in our pantry, I realized this one thing: There's a cultural divide in America. What? you say. This is a big discovery, you say. I know, I know. I'm just brilliant like that. No, hear me out. There's a cultural divide in America, and it should be visible in American English. Cultural divides very often create language shifts. It seems cultural boundaries fit themselves to linguistic boundaries, and vice versa. Well, my friends, it seems that the "Pop vs. Soda" site is backing me up on this one. Note:

Places that use "soda" primarily are definitely blue (Democrat, not blue on the map, though this is the case).
Places that use "coke" primarily are definitely red (Republican, see above).
Places that use "pop" primarily are mostly red.
Places that are sparsely populated:
If they're mostly "pop" they're probably red.
If they're mostly soda, with a significant mix of either or both of the others, they're probably swing states.
Washington, Oregon, and Arizona are a little weird here, but that may be because it's an internet poll, and people like to prove their own points, inappropriately.
Indiana. What the crap?

Further, note that there's a divide, geographically between West Coast and East Coast Dems, but that there's the coke/pop divide between Red States, which corresponds mostly to the Western Republican/Southern (Christian) Republican divide apparent in U.S. Politics.

So, in the end, look at this nice county map of it all and wonder, why didn't we think of this before? I'm going to start calling Arizonans "soda Republicans" and that's that.

*Special thanks to David Bowie (not the rather more famous rock star of the same name) of University of Central Florida for apprising me of this map's existence.

How to Cope With Language Death

Write 'em down, let 'em go.

There's a lot of Wikistuff about language death. Go wiki it. (Someone put me in a stockade for my awful use of that word.) Attached are terms like "killer language", "language murder" and the laughably linguistics-scholarly "linguicide". I don't buy it. Hold on before we go any further: I am vehemently opposed to "English only" and like laws, but I do think that if we are going to make any judgments on the big E then we must also do the same to its colonial imperialist-dog killer language friends, which according to Wikipedia are Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, French, Hindi, Swedish, and Hausa. So, if you hate on English, you hate on Hausa. How could anyone hate on Hausa? It's like kicking a puppy.

People learn language mostly out of a) necessity or b) expectations or social norms or c) difficult to identify internal motivations. Note that a) is so much more important than any other possible reason. This is from personal experience, but I'm sure if you Google Scholared "motivation language acquisition", you'd find some real evidence. Languages die when people are no longer motivated to speak them. In those situations, it's usually best to do the same as when any other organism is dead: plan a funeral.

In this case, the undertakers of languages are usually dressed in tweed rather than black--they're the professors of strange ilk to be found in campuses across the world, and they wield the tape recorder to the great effect of saving what can be remembered of the formerly living form of communication. Let them do their thing. Artificially resuscitating linguistic patterns is likely to be more effective than doing the same to organisms, but is far less fulfilling, as what you usually get is less a living language and more an "undead" one, unfaithful to the original and inaccessible to whichever native populations still exist.

The Rosetta Project is the largest time capsule for the dead and dying. Check out their space-aged language recording project here.

In the meantime, don't freak out that Washo is done for.