The Soda, Pop, Coke map
Ah, regional dialects. Such fun. I’ve always been particular fond of the Soda/Pop/Coke divide in this country. Oddly enough, I live in a one of the few places that uses “Coke” generically that is not the South. If you notice that big yellow blotch in New Mexico, I live in the bright red rectangle immediately below it. (The yellow blotch is the county dominated by our largest suburb, Rio Rancho, which hates it when we call it a suburb (which it is.)) I have no idea what “other” the counties around mine use; maybe “soda pop”?
Skelter will say just “Nam” (pronounced with a long, not short, a, like the country itself) when you ask him about Damsel, saying that she reminds him of the hippies he dealt with during the conflict. Since Los Angeles is not in the Northeast, this does nothing but prove that Brandon lives in a crazy part of the country.
The beating we took from Brother Canker would be completely expected under tabletop rules; by the tabletop rules, there are three stages of damage – bashing, lethal, and aggravated. Bashing is caused by blunt weapons, and also by bullets (largely for convenience); anyone can soak bashing damage. Lethal damage is caused by cutting and piercing attacks; depending on your preference, lethal can either only be soaked by supernatural toughness (being a Werewolf/Vampire, or using Magick if a Mage) or can be soaked by anyone, but at a higher difficulty for mortals (which includes Mages without magical fortification). Aggravated damage is caused by fire and supernatural sources; normally, only Werewolves are able to soak aggravated damage (unless it is silver), though Mages can use magic and Vampires the Fortitude Discipline to soak aggravated wounds.
Potence is considered supernatural strength, and thus the damage is aggravated. As we do not have Fortitude (only Ventrue and Gangrel get it in this game), we cannot soak the damage at all and thus take full damage from every attack that lands. This leads to rapid death, as you see.
To be pedantic, NEITHER of the ‘a’ vowel sounds that you’re referring to are actually used in the *Vietnamese* pronunciation of ‘Viet Nam’ – instead, it use /a/, which is, oddly enough given IPA’s simple choice of typography, a pretty fucking rare sound in English.
I will definitely say, of course, that /ɑ/ is much better (and the sound I’d typically use) than cloud’s /æ/, that crazy freak, I mean seriously where’s he even from? Saturn?
(In truth, a lot of vets DO use /næm/. But lots of others use /nɑm/, and some even use /nɔm/ (like you apparently prefer <_<). So pronunciation amongst vets does vary, though /næm/ is usually stereotyped as the 'redneck-ish' thing to say.)
PHYSIK OUT
Until you can communicate pronunciations in English, GTFO.
The map is wrong for me :/ I come from the small blue funky shaped county below the big red one with the obvious river border in the northeastern part of Oklahoma, but to me both ‘pop’ and ‘coke’ don’t sound right. It’s ‘soda’ to me, and my immediate family.
It MIGHT be because the dominance of NYC and LA make ‘soda’ the dominant form in media, actually. I would expect cities to tend more towards soda because of the tendency to use NYC/SoCal terms in media, with the assumption that urbanites consume more media than rural people, and in either case both my parents have moved around a lot (I was actually born in Cali, for example, and may have stayed there long enough to adopt ‘soda’)
Also, you can practically SEE St. Louis on that map XD. (actually. what’s that purple splotch on the Mississippi, about half way up the state? I think that might BE St. Louis….)
Hmm. Apparently there are 3k counties in the US, and 120k respondents. So, ASSUMING that the number of respondents per county is similar, which if they were smart they’d do since they’re displaying it by… no nvm doesn’t matter… anyway, that’s 40 per county. Theoretically, that should be enough for a rough estimate like this, but if they DIDN’T do it that way, some counties likely have less and are more prone to being wrong.
Anyways, I made a lot of separate points in that comment, sorry. Lots of interesting discussion to be had with a topic like that.
“It’s ‘soda’ to me, and my immediate family.”
Yeah, astoundingly that map is about statistically-significant trends, not ‘like 4 people, give or take 1.8 persons’ ;P
I was ASSUMING I was ignoring everyone at school supposedly calling it ‘pop’