Linguistic Cartography: pop vs soda, as of 2003

One of the dubious miracles made possible by our modern telecommunications infrastructure is the ability of one's high school classmates to continue the sentiments of a major year reunion in everyone's email boxes. This morning brings reflections on My Sharona and mortality.

More importantly, the morning email brings linguistic tidings of exquisite importance to the 50% of the class who have strayed far outside the graduational state: a geographic snapshot of what one generically calls soft drinks in different parts of the US, pop, soda, or Coke.

http://popvssoda.com:2998/countystats/total-county.html

RantWoman notes that the link is a picture of a map of US states broken down by county with each county colored with something indicating the percentage of respondents who favor the top-ranked term. This is visually awful. However, there are links alphabetically by state that, assuming one really wants to read all the numeric tables, give the numbers of respondents for each term by county.

What more could a data geek ask? Well, there is the matter of meaningless precision. RantWoman also wonders whether, for the sake of a second snaphot, might conceivably be addressed without offense say on the census. Well, no one asked RantWoman