Word: sodaed
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...signs lead to a drugstore and soda fountain three-quarters of a block long that has grown into an oasis of friendly commercial hurdy-gurdy in the middle of the sparse prairie. The Wall Drug Store in Wall, S.Dak. (pop. 800), 50 miles east of Rapid City, is a three-generation family business that this year celebrates its 50th anniversary. Its standing offer of free ice water, and coffee for 5?-as much as you can drink of both-helps attract as many as 20,000 customers on a busy summer day, maybe a million a year...
...story of how his wife Dorothy penned some doggerel ("Get a soda, get a beer, turn next corner, just as near, to Highway 16 and 14, free ice water, Wall Drug") to attract thirsty motorists has assumed Arthurian dimensions in South Dakota. Remembers Ted: "We hardly got back to the store from putting the sign up before people started turning in." Before long, billboards sprouted along the highways in every direction; someone once counted 53 along a 45-mile stretch. G.I.s tacked up Wall Drug signs as they made their way through Europe in World War II. The same thing...
...trade on the reputation of Maxwell House instant coffee, stole millions of dollars in sales from the older product. Other attempts at brand extension fail because the gap between the old and the new items is too wide. Arm & Hammer, for example, unsuccessfully tried to stretch its baking-soda name to include an underarm deodorant. The company is still trying, however. It has put its name on new deodorants for carpets and cat litter...
...world of cold war conversation, where it is judged safer and saner to say nothing and assume the worst than to say the worst and get on with it. Now the insult retreats behind a tinny smile and emerges lame from the mouths of wimps at cocktail parties, grasping soda water in both hands and leveling a whine: "I really don't think much of his work." No confrontations there. Face to face with their adversaries they assault them with flattery. Perhaps it's best. Maybe we could no longer endure a life made up of chaotic barkings...
...jelly-bean ice cream had existed in the first quarter of the century, soda jerks would have translated it into cocky fountain lingo. Dickson has compiled a marvelous glossary of such wise-guy locutions, including "Hoboken special," which for some reason signified a pineapple soda with chocolate ice cream, and "twist it, choke it and make it cackle" for a chocolate malted with an egg (twist presumably for the twisting of the malted-milk beater, choke for chocolate, and cackle, of course, for the chicken that laid the egg). New scoop shops do not seem to have developed such...