I don’t know why it took until 2013 for this to happen, or why BusinessInsider.com was the entity to do it, but maybe the most fascinating thing I’ve seen on the internet all week is the series of maps showing the variants in American speech from region to region. For example, Pennsylvania is pretty much the only place in America that thinks all submarine sandwiches are “hoagies”. Alabama and Mississippi are the only states in the country that refer to the phenomenon of raining while sunny as “The Devil Beating His Wife.”
The South is fucking weird, you guys.
But one of the biggest, most disappointing omissions from the survey was the battle between Graveyard and Suicide, aka “Which name do you use for the soda concoction created by ramming a cup under every nozzle on the pop machine at 7-Eleven?”
Growing up here in Oregon, it was a Graveyard. It’s just what we called it. I don’t know who invented it, or how it came to be passed down to us kids from older generations, but that weird orangey-rootbeery-syrupy mess of chemicals was called a graveyard, and that’s how it was. Just like this stupid thing –
– was called the Stussy “S” even though Stussy has never used that S on any of its clothing, and kids had been doodling this stupid thing in the margins of their notebooks before Stussy was even a company.
But as more out-of-staters began setting up shop inside our borders, their kids began infecting the playground vernacular with their strange colloquialisms. Innocent, bad-teeth-having homegrown rugrats were being corrected by snotty little brats from Michigan and California. You’re not drinking a Graveyard; it’s called a Suicide, you big dummy!
Let’s harness the power of the Blogtown Poll to put this thing to bed, once and for all.
Suicide, but I’m from the South.
Hey, why do you all talk about “barbequing” every time you turn on a grill? That’s grilling. You don’t barbeque a hamburger. If you go to a BBQ joint, it’s not for a hot dog.
In So Cal we called it a suicide and this is literally the first time i’ve ever heard it called a graveyard.
Garbage pail, eastern PA, land of the most delicious sandwich of all . . . the grinder.
OK soda. But I’m from an OK Soda test market.
“Rainbow,” Northeast.
Also I’d be curious to know the “did something ON accident” versus “did something BY accident” breakdown.
@ Ned: Could the NE try ANY harder to be the gayest?
I am from here and I think I called it a graveyard but I just texted my brother and he said we called it a suicide. That map listicle made me completely unsure of what I have ever called anything. C-A-R-A-M-E-L?!?! I have no idea. The only thing I’m sure about is crawdad.
You say you are from Oregon, but then you refer to pop as “soda”! Shenanigans! Shenanigans, I say!
Grew up in the Seattle area — this was always called a Graveyard. It was even listed on the menu at the roller rink.
Also, about that OK Soda…
Throughout my entire youth in Sherwood, Oregon, I had no idea that there was a term for what my little brother did all the time at McDonald’s. We just called it a mixed drink.
What I called a “Suicide” was taking multiple pumps from each Slush Puppy flavor, THEN adding all the soda flavors and topping it off with a little bit of Slushy ice.
It’s a suicide which ironically, as a native Southern Californian, most Oregonians would like me to commit.
WTF is a Slush Puppy, is it like an ICEE?
As a high school goth, I called it BOTH because it was an excuse to throw around either word during lunch break. Pacific Northwest.
Black Death/NJ, though this terminology mostly applied to Slush Puppies which were available at school.
“Potions”. And yinz call the sandwich hoagies and the drink pop – and Pittsburgh n’at.