Why are there reaches on Risa's peanut butter cups?
Probably so they never slip from her hands.
Could you imagine? I'd lose it.
Luckily, Risa's thought about that.
Wonder what else they think about.
Probably chocolate and peanut butter.
Grammar Girl here. I'm Inyan Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.
Today, we're going to talk about the reasons people say pop, soda, or Coke.
And then to boost your Scrabble score, we're going to look at where you can use a Q without a U.
But first, thanks to the listeners who got in touch to tell me how to pronounce the Russian word for bread that is spelled X -L -E -B.
Apparently the X is pronounced like an H, so it's more like Heleb.
And this next segment is by linguist Valerie Friedland.
With burgers sizzling and classic rock thumping, many Americans revel in summer cookouts, at least until that wayward cousin asks for a pop in soda country, or even worse, a coke when they actually want a Sprite.
Few American linguistic debates have bubbled quite as long and as effervescently as the one over whether a generic soft drink should be called a soda, pop, or coke.
The word you use generally boils down to where you're from.
Midwesterners enjoy a good pop, while soda is tops in the north and far west. Southerners, along the cultural mavericks, don't bat an eyelash asking for a coke, lowercase, before homing in on exactly what type they want, perhaps a root beer or a coke uppercase.
As a linguist who studies American dialects, I'm less interested in this regional divide and far more fascinated by the unexpected history behind how a fizzy health drink from the early 1800s spawned the modern soft drinks' many names and iterations.
Foods and drinks with wellness benefits might seem like a modern phenomenon, but the urge to create drinks with medicinal properties inspired what might be called a soda revolution in the 1800s.
The process of carbonating water was first discovered in the late 1700s.
By the early 1800s, the carbonated water had become popular as a health drink and was often referred to as soda water.
The word soda likely came from sodium since these drinks often contained salts, which were then believed to have healing properties.
Given its alleged curative effects for health issues such as indigestion, Pharmacists sold soda water at soda fountains, innovative devices that created carbonated water to be sold by the glass.
A chemistry professor, Benjamin Stillman, set up the first such device in a drugstore in New Haven, Connecticut in 1806.
Its eventual success inspired a boom of soda fountains in drugstores and health spas.
By the mid -1800s, pharmacists were creating unique root, fruit, and herb -infused concoctions, such as sassafras -based root beer, at their soda fountains, often marketing them as cures for everything from fatigue to foul moods.
These flavored, sweetened versions gave rise to the linking of the word soda with a sweetened, carbonated beverage, as opposed to a simple, carbonated water.
Selser, today's popular term for such sparkling water, was around too, but it was used only for the naturally carbonated mineral water from the German town Nieder Selsers.
Unlike Perrier, sourced similarly from a specific spring in France, Selser made the leap to becoming a generic term for fizzy water.
So how did soda come to be called so many different things in different places?
Well, it all stems from a mix of economic enterprise and linguistic ingenuity.
The popularity of soda in the Northeast likely reflects the soda fountain's longer history in the region.
Since a lot of Americans living in the Northeast migrated to California in the mid to late 1800s, the name likely traveled west with them.
As for the Midwestern preference for pop, well, the earliest American use of the term to refer to a sparkling beverage appeared in the the 1840s in the name of a flavored version called ginger pop.
Such ginger -flavored pop, though, was around in Britain by 1816, since a Newcastle songbook is where you can first see it used in text.
The pop seems to be onomatopoic for the noise made when the cork is released from the bottle before drinking.
Linguists don't fully know why pop became so so popular in the Midwest. But one theory links it to a Michigan bottling company, Faginson Brothers Bottling Works, today known as Fago Beverages, that used pop in the name of the sodas they marketed and sold.
Another theory suggests that because bottles were more common in the region, soda drinkers were more likely to hear the pop sound than in the Northeast, where soda fountains reigned.
As for using Coke generically, the first Coca -Cola was served in in 1886 by Dr. John Pemberton, a pharmacist at Jacobs Pharmacy in Atlanta and the founder of the company.
In the 1900s, the Coca -Cola Company tried to stamp out the use of Coke for Coca -Cola, but that ship had already sailed.
Since Coca -Cola originated and was overwhelmingly popular in the South, its generic use grew out of the fact that people almost always asked for Coke.
As with with Jell -O, Kleenex, Band -Aids, and Seltzer, it became a generic term.
And speaking of soft drinks, what's up with that term?
Well, it originally used to distinguish all non -alcoholic drinks from hard drinks or drinks containing spirits.
Interestingly, the original Coca -Cola formula included wine, resembling a type of alcoholic health drink popular overseas, Vin Mariani.
But Pemberton went on to develop a soft version a few years later to be sold as a medicinal drink.
Due to the growing popularity of soda water concoctions, eventually soft drink came doing only such sweetened, carbonated beverages, a linguistic testament to America's enduring love affair with sugar and bubbles.
With the average American guzzling almost 40 gallons per year, you can call it whatever you want, just don't call it healthy.
That segment was written by Valerie Friedland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of Like Literally Dude, arguing for the good in bad English.
It originally appeared in The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
You can find Valerie at ValerieFriedland .com.
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Picture this. You're in an intense Scrabble showdown.
You've got a cue tile burning a hole in your rack.
but no U in sight. Game over?
Well, maybe not. There are a few English words that break the Q followed by U rule, and some of them are definitely playable in a Scrabble match. But before I give you the Scrabble lowdown, let's talk about why Q and U usually hang out together in the first place.
You've probably learned since kindergarten that Q and U stick together like peanut butter and jelly in most English words.
But did you know that it's a relationship that goes back thousands of years?
The story of Q plus U is kind of a linguistic game of hot potato, with letters and sounds passed from one language's alphabet to the next.
The letter Q traces back to the ancient Semitic letter Qoph, spelled Q -O -P -H or Q -O -P, P, which represented something linguists might call a voiceless uvular stop.
That's the sound made at the back of the mouth.
The Phoenicians passed this letter to the Greeks, who adapted it as kappa, but later dropped it from their standard alphabet because they didn't need a KW sound.
The Etruscans adopted and used it specifically in combination with U to represent the kwa sound in Latin, distinguishing it from C and K.
And then they passed it on to the Romans.
And that's why a significant number of our Q plus U words stem from Latin.
So in English, Q and U are like partners that almost always hang out together.
The Q makes a K sound and the U adds the W sound right after it.
Together, they create that distinctive Q sound we hear in words like queen, quick, and question.
This pairing became so standard that English speakers came to expect it.
When Q appears without U, it feels weird because we've been conditioned to expect Q and U to show up together.
And now here's the Scrabble advantage I promised.
Memorizing these Q without U words could change your strategy forever.
Qi. This two -letter word spelled Q -I refers to the vital life force in Chinese philosophy.
It's just two letters worth a whopping 11 points in Scrabble, so that tiny word can be a game changer if you play it on a double or triple word score.
Next is Kaid. That's Q -A -I -D.
This word refers to a Muslim leader or chieftain in North Africa.
With a couple of common vowels in its makeup, this is one of those sneaky words you can often play off a word already on the board. Next is kivyut.
I love this one. Q -I -V -I -U -T.
It's the soft underwall of the Arctic muskox.
Imagine the look on your opponent's face when you play this six -letter word across a triple word score.
Next is fakir. You may have heard this this one before.
Spelled F -A -Q -I -R, it refers to a Muslim or Hindu religious ascetic.
And a few Scrabble dictionaries may accept these outliers.
QWERTY, spelled Q -W -E -R -T -Y, and always in all caps, represents the standard English language typing keyboard layout named for the first six letters on the top row of the keyboard. Dictionaries like Merriam -Webster include QWERTY as a word, but you might not find it in certain Scrabble dictionaries.
And Zaddik, spelled Z -A -D -D -I -Q, is a Hasidic Jewish spiritual leader or a saintly righteous person in the Jewish faith.
This one's kind of a cheat.
The common spelling is Z -A -D -D -I -K, but some Scrabble dictionaries accept the alternate spelling that ends in Q.
So if you're relying on a standard or older Scrabble dictionary, you might not find QWERTY or Zadig.
But if you're using an online source like ScrabbleWordFinder .org just for fun, you're good to go.
Now let's talk about the Q without U words English borrows from other languages that play by different rules.
When English borrows these words, it often keeps their original spelling.
In Mandarin Chinese written in pinyin, Q represents a completely different sound than in English, something closer to ch but made with the tongue in a different position.
Qi is the scrabble word we talked about earlier.
In Chinese medicine, it's believed to flow through pathways in your body called meridians.
Qi gong, q -i -g -o -n -g, is a system of coordinated movements, breathing, and meditation designed to enhance qi flow and improve health.
It's similar to tai chi, but with more focus on the movement of energy.
energy. And Arabic has a letter that's traditionally written as Q when it's converted to R alphabet.
It represents a deep, throaty sound that I won't be trying to replicate for you today, but here are a few words that use it.
Burqa, B -U -R -Q -A, is a full -body covering worn by some Muslim women that includes a mesh screen over the eyes.
Qat, spelled Q -A -T, tea is a flowering plant native to East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
People sometimes chew its leaves as a stimulant during social gatherings in countries like Yemen.
And Qadi, spelled Q -A -D -I, is a judge who makes decisions according to Islamic law.
Place names also often preserve their original spellings when adopted into English.
Here are a few places around the globe that break the Q plus U rule.
The capital city of Nunavut in northern Canada is Iqaluit.
There is a U in this word, but not after the Q.
It's I -Q -A -L -U -I -T.
The city is named for an Inuit word meaning place of many fish.
These rare Q words tell us something important about language.
It's constantly borrowing and adapting, like a collector who travels the world, bringing home treasures treasures from other languages and cultures.
Each exception to the rule is like a little souvenir from a different part of the world.
That statement was written by Karen Lundy, a career writer and editor.
In the late 90s, as a young mom with two kids and a dog, she founded one of the internet's first writing workshop communities.
These days, she facilitates expressive writing workshops, both online and off.
Find her at chanterellestorystudio .com.
Finally, I have a family -elect story from Jamie.
Hi, Grammar Girl. My name is Jamie, and I'm here to share my story of my fiance's family's weird lingo.
So the first one, the most entertaining one that I can think of right now, is that the ends of the pizza, the bread crust after you're done eating your pizza, if you don't want to finish it, it's called a pizza bone.
To my knowledge, this originated because they had a family dog growing up, and the dog would get the ends of the pizza, and the ends of the pizza was shaped like a dog bone.
So that's my story.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for the call, Jamie.
That was one lucky dog.
Do you, dear listeners, have a family -like story?
If so, I'd love to hear it, and so would everyone else.
Send me a recording of a made -up word you use only with your friends or family, leaving a message on the voicemail line at 83 -3214 -GIRL, or leaving a voice message on WhatsApp.
Be sure to call from somewhere quiet, and if you want that number or link later, they are in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast, and we have lots of other shows.
Tomorrow, Nutrition Diva has a show about resistant starches.
Here's a little clip.
But your saliva also contains small amounts of an enzyme called amylase, which starts to break down starch the moment you begin chewing.
So I remember doing a fun experiment in about the fifth grade or so that demonstrated this in a very memorable way.
And you can even try this at home with your kids.
So you chew a plain, unsalted saltine cracker for long enough, and it will start to taste faintly sweet.
And when that happens, you are literally tasting the starch being broken down into sugar on your tongue.
That episode drops tomorrow, and again, it's The Nutrition Diva.
Thanks to Dan Feyerabend in audio, Morgan Christensen in advertising, Holly Hutchings, Director of Podcasts, and Nat Hoops in Marketing, who has two cats named Milo and Seashell.
And Milo is almost 18 years old.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip of day book, The Grammar Daily.
That's all. Thanks for listening.
