Artemis said:
Actually, pop the drink came before pop the music. Pop music is called that because the fans were young people who drank pop.
That puzzled me; I'd always understood that 'pop' was simply an abbreviation of 'popular'. I don't have access to the complete Oxford English Dictionary online any more (to check the etymology there), but a quick Google found several references to pop music being a shortened form of popular.
Here's one encyclopaedia entry:
Popular music, sometimes abbreviated the genre pop music, is music belonging to any number of musical styles that (in their heyday at least) are broadly popular... A narrower sense of the term, usually 'pop music', covers mainstream music that does not fall into any more specialised style such as jazz or hip hop.
Britannica uses popular music and pop as synonymous.
Looking up 'pop music' in
www.infoplease.com retrives this:
pop music, pop, popular music, popular music genre
usage: music of general appeal to teenagers; a bland watered-down version of rock'n'roll with more rhythm and harmony and an emphasis on romantic love
Cambridge Online Dictionary:
Definition
pop (MUSIC) noun [U] (FORMAL popular music)
modern popular music, usually with a strong beat, created with electrical or electronic equipment, and easy to listen to and remember:
I won't bore people with any more - but the two terms, pop and popular music, are used as interchangeable on virtually every site I looked at.
Wendy
