Billie Holiday once said, “Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.”  “Pop” isn’t as common an endearment as it was when Lady Day was born in 1915, according to Google’s n-gram viewer, “an online search engine that charts the frequencies of any set of search strings using a yearly count of n-grams found in printed sources published between 1500 and 2022.”  With it you can track a particular word’s popularity and compare it with other words.  N-gramming “pop,” “dad,” ‘daddy,” and “papa” revealed that dad is about 2.75 times more popular than daddy. Pop is 20 percent below dad but around 30 percent above daddy, which surprisingly has recently been surpassed slightly by papa. 

“Pop” is a euphemism for “soft drink” as is soda and coke.  When I was 10 a young Yankee friend who’d moved to Texas mystified me by offering me a pop, which I associated with fatherhood.  A southern Living article by Valerie Luesse, “Why Southerners Refer to All Soft Drinks as ‘Coke’,” explains the phenomenon.  “The whole soda vs. pop vs. coke debate is bigger than any of us …. Native Texans (like most native Southerners) call all soft drinks “coke”—a generic use of Coke, as in Coca-Cola, invented in Atlanta.”  Luesse cited cartographer Alan McConchie who created a color-coded map tracking how soft drinks are called around the country.  He found that “the ‘pop’ people are mainly concentrated in the Midwest and Northwest, while the ‘soda’ speakers live in the Northeast, Southwest, and pockets in between. Most Southerners, meanwhile, tend to call any soft drink a ‘Coke,’ no matter what brand they’re sipping.”  His poll found that in “Kentucky, 2,248 out of 4,520 respondents are in Camp Coke. For Georgia, it’s 4,933 out of 6,908.2 Texas? That would be 14,494 out of 20,574.”  However, Alaska’s split among soda and pop.  When the terms are n-grammed, pop is 2.5 times more popular than soda and 6 times more than coke.

The first pop many of us encountered came from the nursery rhyme “Pop! Goes the Weasel,” and its origin’s worth a gander.  “Behind the Meaning of the Joyous Nursery Rhyme, ‘Pop! Goes the Weasel,” an Americansongwriters.com article by Jacob Uitti, traces it back to June 1852 when an English regatta boat raced under that name.  By December 1852 it was a hit song, and a dance had been created.  The following year sheet music came out with dance step instructions but contained no lyrics, and Wikipedia added that the lively tune was originally a Scottish hit from the 1700s called “The Haymaker.”  The well-known weasel-related lyrics weren’t added until 1854.  Uitti noted that “in her autobiographical novel, which was published in 1932, American author Laura Ingall’s Wilder remembered her father singing the below lyrics as early as 1873: All around the cobbler’s bench, The monkey chased the weasel. The preacher kissed the cobbler’s wife—Pop! goes the weasel! A penny for a spool of thread, Another for a needle, That’s the way the money goes—Pop! Goes the weasel!”  Other lyrics are grimmer: “Jimmy’s got the whooping cough, And Timmy’s got the measles. That’s the way the story goes, Pop! goes the weasel. I’ve no time to wait and sigh, No patience to wait ’til by and by. Kiss me quick, I’m off, goodbye! Pop! goes the weasel. Half a pound of tuppenny rice, Half a pound of treacle. Mix it up and make it nice, Pop! goes the weasel.”  About the rice and treacle, Wikipedia said a “modern writer notes, it was ‘the cheapest and nastiest food’ available to London’s poor.”

Uitti added that the “key to understanding what the fun song means … is the word ‘weasel’ …. A spinner’s weasel consists of a wheel that is revolved by the spinner to measure off thread or yarn after it has been produced on the spinning wheel. The weasel is usually built so that the circumference is six feet so that 40 revolutions produce 80 yards of yarn. It has wooden gears inside and a cam, designed to cause a popping sound after the 40th revolution, indicating to the spinner that the work or measurement is done.  But in this case, the “popping” is likely not a good thing. If we read back to the verses, so many bad things are going on. Someone is sick, money has to be spent on cheap food, and the like. So, with all these tasks done, what happens next? The wheel breaks! POP!”

Our second pop likely came from pop-up books.  A reminder came from a recent Tundra cartoon by Chad Carpenter titled “History’s first pop-up book”: a caveman opens the rock covers of a book as a stone pops out to smack him in the nose.  Another pop-up prompter came when my British cartoonist pen pal Pier Baker, sent me an original drawing from his delightful comic strip, Ollie and Quintin (that’s available at GoComics).  Quintin, a lugworm, is reading a book and tells his pal, a seagull named Ollie, “Paw! This book is as bad as the internet.”  Ollie opens the book and asks, “Badly written, poorly researched, and full of inaccuracies?” and then falls over backwards as a large popup figure emerges from the book.  In the final frame Quintin replies, “Annoying pop-ups.”  Pop-up books are a relatively recent innovation to the much older genre “movable books.”  The University of North Texas libraries possess a notable collection of pop-up books, and their article, “A Brief History of Early Movable Books,” explains that the “first movable books actually predate the print culture. The earliest known examples of such interactive mechanisms are by Ramon Llull (c.1235-1316) of Majorca, a Catalan mystic and poet. His works contain volvelles or revolving discs, which he used to illustrate his complex philosophical search for truth …. Other types of movables, in particular ‘turn-up’ or “lift-the-flap” mechanisms, were in use as early as the fourteenth century. They were especially helpful in books on anatomy.”  Moreover, “Movable books were not created for juvenile audiences until the early nineteenth century. In fact, children’s books were not published on a large scale until the latter half of the eighteenth century, when publisher John Newbery began selling books specifically for children.”  The first successful such works were Robert Sayers’ 1765 “lift-the-flap” style books that “consisted of two engraved scenes. Both scenes were split in the center by a series of flaps, layered one top of another and attached at the top and bottom of the scene, so each could be lifted up from the center. The various half-scenes on the top and bottom of every flap corresponded and were interchangeable with one another. As a result, turning up the flaps created amusing variations in the scenes.” For example, the top flaps show humorous figures from the waist up while the bottom flaps showed from the waist down.  “Descriptive verses accompanied each flap and informed the reader the order in which the scenes should be unveiled.”  He called these “harlequinades” after the theatrical pantomime theater character Harlequin, and they proved a huge publishing success. 

Wikipedia added that other types of moveable books include tunnel books (aka “peepshow books”) that were inspired by theatrical stage sets and “consist of a set of pages bound with two folded concertina strips on each side and viewed through a hole in the cover. Openings in each page allow the viewer to see through the entire book to the back, and images on each page work together to create a dimensional scene inside.”  Another kind of movables, transformation books, show a scene made up of vertical slats. When a reader pulls a tab on the side, the slats slide under and over one another to ‘transform’ into a totally different scene.” 

The first true pop-up books, with images that rose up from the pages, operated by pulling ribbons or tabs, but in 1929 a book with pictures that popped-up automatically arrived with the Louis Giraud’s “Bookano” pop-ups.  These are “considered the first, true pop-up books for children because the pop-ups can be viewed from a full 360 degrees.”  German artist, paper engineer and publisher Lothar Meggendorfer (1847-1925) remains a giant among moveable book aficionados.  The UNT Library article on him states that “Meggendorfer’s movables are some of the most complex mechanisms ever created in the genre. A pull of the tab activates a complex array of multiple levers, which in turn animates several features in each illustration. The images, amazing in their complexity and innovation, are equally appealing for their humor and accompanying verses.”  The Movable Book Society awards Meggendorfer Prizes for “the most outstanding commercially published pop-up or movable books every other year.  The society’s members include scads of pop-up collectors, like Harold Goralnick.  The Bowdoin College Library’s notable pop-up book collection was established in 2008 when Goralnick (class of 1971) donated his 1,900-book collection, including many old and rare copies.  The late popcorn giant Orville Redenbacher knew a lot about popping and said when “Every once in a while, someone will mail me a single popcorn kernel that didn’t pop. I’ll get out a fresh kernel, tape it to a piece of paper and mail it back to them.”   And when his grandson was asked if he and his siblings called Orville “grandpop” or “pop-pop,” he replied, “sadly we just called him Grandpa Orville.”