I forgot about tonic!

Consuela, your brother's restaurant is like 1/2 a mile from Bob's office in Chicago (and it sounds right up his alley!). I'll pass along the rec and have him share it with his friends and co-workers. And get him to take me there next time I'm out!

Sodapop?

Ponyboy??

I grew up in greater Boston saying soda but knowing about tonic. Like spa -- I don't think I ever used it generically for corner store, but I got it.

"Cold drink" was pretty common in BR - I don't know how we knew that didn't mean ice tea or lemonade, but we did. Not as common as Coke, though.

My grandmother (from the Gulf coast of Texas) says cold drink! I thought it could be iced tea, though, but maybe I'm wrong. I always figured it was just to distinguish from an alcoholic drink (which she would never be offering anyone).

I'll pass along the rec and have him share it with his friends and co-workers.

Woot! I'm very excited for him, and I'm looking forward to going there the next time I'm in town. For one thing, the photos look gorgeous--they got a lot of furniture & stuff from an abandoned factory, so it's kind of rural-industrial-antiquey inside.

My grandmother called them soft drinks.

Thanks for that rec, Consuela (and huge luck to your brother and the other owner(s)!). My dad takes my nephew out to eat every month (C is a senior at Roosevelt Univ., and lives in school housing downtown), and is always looking for new suggestions (even though C is such a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to food and refuses to try anything that isn't a steak or burger), so I sent him that article and suggested he try it next time.

Dope (similarly old-school, Southern)

Or Coke (to refer to any soda/pop generically).

Awesome, Kathy! I do hope they enjoy it.

Soft drinks, as opposed to hard drinks/hard liquor, right?

I always thought the term cold drink came from them being bought chilled, from a machine, rather than with ice. My grandpa would always say cold drink to mean a bottled soda.

In re hair color - my hair's a fairly bright auburn at this point (due for a color and cut on Saturday). I've had a couple of people ask me if the colorist bleached it before applying color ... and it later occurred to me that no, he doesn't ... because my hair's mostly white at this point.

I DID get the dramatic white streak in my dark hair; someone once said that if she didn't know me better, she'd think I'd done it artificially. Then it went mostly white and I've become addicted to the red.