Agog for the Cola Wars

As I have mentioned before, I regularly have to create cloze tests for which write a brief article using a dozen or so of the vocabulary items from a list the students have memorized. I then blank out those words, and the students have to decide which word goes in which blank. Since the lists of target words have no thematic unity (Paul Nation has shown to my satisfaction that memorizing groups of semantically related words is less effective), coming up with a topic which can incorporate several words from the list is an enjoyable challenge, and past topics have ranged from Stonehenge to sleeping sickness to the Gunpowder Plot. Yesterday (August 1), inspired by the inclusion of the words sip and similarity on the target list, I wrote an article about Coke, Pepsi, and the Cola Wars.

Today I was catching up on some blogs and read Maolsheachlann's post "The First Defenestration of Prague," which was published on July 30 but which I did not read until just now. It's a list of historical events that have "unique and often poetic names," and here's how the post ends:

The Battle of Britpop: When Oasis and Blur both released their new singles on the same day in 1995, prompting intense media speculation on which of them would reach number one. Blur won the battle, although Oasis won the war. (I like to joke: "I saw some hard times. I lived through the Cola Wars and the Battle of Britpop.")

You get the point. Any other suggestions? I'm agog.

Janelle Monae doesn't really enunciate the final consonant in cold, and I like to imagine that she's singing, "This is a Cola War / You better know what you're fighting for."

Maolsheachlann's use of agog -- the last word in his post -- reminded me of "Baggu ash-ni fire-dwell a gog ifluaren bansil este repose" (March 2024), in which I tried to decipher some of Bill's "words." Here's what I wrote about a gog:

a gog:

The sync fairies seem to be insisting that this is what G stands for. Gog is proper name, so the use of a is anomalous. Various interpretations suggest themselves. It could mean not the Gog but just a Gog, or it could be meant to suggest the word agog -- which could be (a) the English adverb, (b) the Greek for "leader," or (c) a word halfway between Gog and Magog. I don't really get what Gog means, even at the symbolic level, so I'm not really sure where to go with this.

Then in the comments I added

Perhaps a gog relates to French à gogo, "galore."

The Janelle Monae song, with it's repeated lines "You better know what you're fighting for" and "Do you know what you're fighting for?" made me think of the Country Joe and the Fish song "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" (1967).

I don't know that song at all well. I didn't even know what it was called or who sang it until I looked it up just now. I was thinking of these lines from the chorus:

And it's 1, 2, 3

What are we fighting for?

When I looked up the lyrics, I was surprised to find that they also include this:

Well come on Wall Street don't move slow

Why man, this is war-a-go-go