Soda vs. pop is a long-standing vernacular battle among the different regions of America.
Minnesota is in the pop camp.
But that's not the only difference between us Minnesotans and the rest of the country in how we talk. We tend to pronounce the word "crayon" with a single syllable, "kran," while most of the country uses two-syllable pronunciations. A garage sale here is a rummage sale in Milwaukee. A drinking fountain here is a water fountain in the South and Northeast — and, mysteriously, a "bubbler" in Green Bay and Boston. And of course, the game the rest of the country calls Duck, Duck, Goose.
Josh Katz, who grew up in southern New Jersey, was drawn to regional differences in language. The oblong sandwiches he called "hoagies" were called "subs" in the northern part of the state.
"I remember being really fascinated by the idea of where that line was, where hoagies became subs, and other words like that in the country," said Katz, a graphics editor at the New York Times.
He started collecting data on dialect for a statistics project in graduate school and never looked back. Katz developed an online quiz that eventually culled 350,000 responses from Americans about the words they use.
Now, he presents that data in "Speaking American: How Y'all, Youse, and You Guys Talk," a colorful new coffee-table book that uses maps of the United States to reveal the unique regionalisms in our language.
We spoke to Katz about why you can't lump Minnesota and Wisconsin together linguistically, whether accents are on their way out and why people get so worked up about the words they use.