Pop?

Alisha, the activities director, asked me to play Reader's Digest editor and condense an article on spring health tips she'd found on the web. She needed a few paragraphs for the monthly calendar. "Can you work your magic with this?" she asked, handing the printout to me. "Oh, baby, if it's magic you want, it's magic I've got," I said to myself. "Sure, when do you need it?" I said to Alisha.

The article was the usual list of suggestions for improving one's health: eating better, getting outside and enjoying the pleasant weather, exercising more. The last item, staying hydrated, isn't unusual in this type of article, but this time it grabbed my attention. "Don't be tempted by those cans of diet pop in the refrigerator," it said. In the second paragraph, it warned of the ill effects of "sugar-laden pop."

Pop? I grew up in the environs of Pittsburgh, where sugar-laden carbonated water is"pop". It wasn't until I went off to college in Buckhannon, WV that I realized not everyone went to the vending machine for a can of pop. The folks not from western Pennsylvania went to get a "soda". During the nearly forty years I lived in Ashtabula, "pop," as a synonym for "soft drink," all but disappeared from the thesaurus in my brain.

When "pop" popped up in the article, I jumped to the conclusion that it was the product of an organization located in the greater Pittsburgh area. I combed the article for some mention of the website it was taken from. Unfortunately, that information did not appear in the printout Alisha had given me. However, going through the article a second time all but eliminated the possibility of the piece coming out of Pittsburgh. Two dieticians were quoted several times each in the article; one was from somewhere in Alberta. the other from British Columbia. Those wily Canadians are speaking Pittsburghese, eh.