Here's a question for the banter - what do you call the end pieces of a loaf of bread?
Heels.
Which was the #1 answer, which was another surprise.
I wonder if it's a Midwest thing? Most of my people came out of North Dakota and Iowa.
Must be. Like the difference between soda and pop, pop being something you don't hear much outside the Midwest.
That's one that I think shows my west coast origins. I didn't hear it referred to as "pop" until we moved to Texas in the mid-70s. It was always "coke," or "soda." Both my grandmothers, one of whom was from North Dakota and the other from Moulton, Iowa, referred to it as "soda pop." But both my parents referred to it as "coke," or "soda" and that's what I picked up.
That surprises me, Texas having spots where it's referred to as pop. And not many things about Texas surprise me these days.
Like I said to TD, it was more a generational thing. I was eleven when we moved to Texas, and that was a pretty heavy culture shock in 1976 for a kid who'd been born at the ass-end of Silicon Valley and arrived in Texas after five years in Arizona. Linguistically, there were a lot of new usages and pronunciations to master. But how soft drinks were referred to was a pretty clear line of demarcation between generations.
Which makes sense. Some of the things we said as kids confused the hell out of our parents, and I'm constantly asking my kids to define a word they just used because I have no idea what they meant when they said it.
EDIT: My recent favorite is probably "no cap", which, for some reason, means true. Of course, I start immediately using it to try to make it sound as lame as possible. 
Yeah, that's an interesting usage. Like so many slang terms that come from hip-hop culture, it would seem logical to suggest that it comes from the notion of hiding something - keeping it under a cap, so to speak - but there is no available evidence to suggest that link.
But hip-hop is poetry, so tracing origins becomes difficult. Whoever started it might well have used it poetically, with meaning understood from context, and there you go. Whoever first used it coined the usage.
Shakespeare invented a mind-bogggling multitude of words and usages for the English language, or at least we think he did because we can find no prior usage.
