Screen_shot_2013-06-07_at_10.58.03_AM.png

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 -

Stussy.jpg

- 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.