Coat or jacket?  Submarine sandwich or hero?  Sometimes, where you live can define what words mean.  There may be no clearer example of this than whether you say pop, soda, or Coke.   In some parts of the country a soda is called a pop (or vice versa), and in other regions all pops (or sodas) were referred to as a Coke, even when it's a Pepsi.   Bert Vaux, a linguistics professor at Harvard University, says many Americans are overly passionate about how they refer to the popular beverage family.  "For reasons that are unclear to me people feel they have license to attack those who say pop as stupid or illogical," Vaux said.  "I use Coke because I grew up in Houston. They're not too fond of that around here. However, it's not as stigmatized as saying pop."
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Here in the U.S., you can name your child almost anything, but that's not the case everywhere in the world.  Some countries have fairly strict baby-naming laws, such as:

Sweden: Enacted in 1982, the Naming law in Sweden reads: "First names shall not be approved if they can cause offense or can be supposed to cause discomfort for the one using it, or names which for some obvious reason are not suitable as a first name."   "Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116" (pronounced Albin, naturally) was submitted by a child's parents in protest of the Naming law. It was rejected. The parents later submitted "A" (also pronounced Albin) as the child's name. It, too, was rejected.

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Kerry Drake's mother was dying.  Then, on a morning this past January his brother called him to say her time had come.  So he booked the earliest flight possible from his home in San Francisco to Lubbock, Texas via Houston.  When Kerry got on the plane and became aware that his flight was delayed leaving San Francisco, he became visibly distraught.  The delay risked his chances of making his connecting flight to Lubbock that was scheduled to leave 40 minutes after he landed in Texas.  "I knew this itinerary was a risk because the stopover in Houston was (brief), and my connecting flight was the last flight to Lubbock that day," he said. “I knew that everything had to go right for me to make it home to say goodbye to my mom."
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We can't always avoid events that upset us, but we may be able to change how we feel about them. If you are cut off in traffic, you may respond by blowing your horn. It is then possible you'll spend the rest of your commute thinking about the actions of that careless driver. But by mentally taking a step back from the situation and your emotions -- a process known as self-distancing -- you can diffuse your anger and reduce your aggression, researchers say.

Ohio State University psychology graduate student Dominik Mischkowski and his colleagues set out to annoy a group of student volunteers by leading them to believe they were waiting for a study to start. The researchers avoided answering questions and were generally curt. After confirming that the volunteers were indeed upset, Mischkowski asked them to re-imagine the experience: half the group by reliving it through their own eyes and the other half by mentally moving away from the situation and watching it at a distance, as if it had happened to someone else. The self-distancing students had less anger and were less likely to respond aggressively to others in a subsequent task.

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When he was 13 years old, Tim Harris told people that one day he would own and operate a restaurant. And for the past three years he has: Tim's Place, of Albuquerque, N.M.  Why is yet another owner-operated restaurant a big deal?  Because Tim, now 27, has Down Syndrome.  Running any type of business was never something that Tim's parents expected of him.  But after he expressed interest in the restaurant business, Tim's parents, Keith and Jeannie, figured out a way to make Tim's dream a reality.  "We were very motivated for Tim to have as normal as life as possible," Keith Harris said.
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