Astounded, Shocked, Astonished, Confounded and Stupefied

That is how I felt when I learned that a Yahoo survey found one of the top ten most searched terms for 18- to 35-year-olds is:

What is a synonym?

Survey info via The Week magazine, September 13, 2013

Image credit: bogglesworldesl.com

The Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes - Do You Call it Soda, Pop, Coke or What?

While doing some research for the class I am teaching, I came across a Cambridge dialect survey that I would like to encourage all of my readers to take.

"What we are interested in is not what other people believe is "correct" English or what you think you and others should say, but what you actually do say."


The questions and multiple-choice answers from the survey are informative and entertaining and it only takes a few minute to answer them.

Plus, as an added bonus (wow, look at that redundancy) once you have completed the survey you can view the results that are tabulated on a daily basis.

Following is one of the questions with the current results to pique your interest:

Question: "What is your generic casual or informal term for a sweetened carbonated beverage? (As in: "We have milk, beer, apple juice, and four kinds of _____: Pepsi, 7Up, root beer, and ginger ale.") Results as of 9/13/2009:

soda (31%)
pop (17%)
soft drink (14%)
coke (8%)
I just call each kind by its individual name (6%)
Other responses (21%)