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It's a brain spasm. People who say this with any type of regularity slowly reach a vegetative like state, where every single world of every single sentence turns into a series of "hellas"
Watch as this sentence gets infected with "NorCal"
"It's a nice day outside"
"It's a hella nice day outside"
"It's a hella day outside"
"It's hella hella outside"
"It's hella hella hella"
"Hella hella hella hella"
See? 6 degrees of helladom. Fall into one, you will fall through the rest.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bradly
The first time someone said, you live near a "wash"... I was like, what the hell is that?
Turns out Wash is an ARROYO in New Mexico. No one calls it a wash. Not even the out-a-staters.
I've heard it called both words in California. However, more often or not, "arroyo" is a proper noun usually referring to a place called "Arroyo ______" like "Arroyo Grande" I think the same holds true in Arizona as well (at least when I lived there)
It's a brain spasm. People who say this with any type of regularity slowly reach a vegetative like state, where every single world of every single sentence turns into a series of "hellas"
Watch as this sentence gets infected with "NorCal"
"It's a nice day outside"
"It's a hella nice day outside"
"It's a hella day outside"
"It's hella hella outside"
"It's hella hella hella"
"Hella hella hella hella"
See? 6 degrees of helladom. Fall into one, you will fall through the rest.
Haha! It was 10 years ago that South Park had an episode about how annoying "hella" is. It still hasn't died, eh?
Some dialect from N.E. PA:
1. I'm goin up the mall
2. Stuffed "mangos" for dinner again (peppers)
3. That was fun , heyna? (ain't it, sort of)
4. I need a "couple, two, tree" of those
It's a brain spasm. People who say this with any type of regularity slowly reach a vegetative like state, where every single world of every single sentence turns into a series of "hellas"
Watch as this sentence gets infected with "NorCal"
"It's a nice day outside"
"It's a hella nice day outside"
"It's a hella day outside"
"It's hella hella outside"
"It's hella hella hella"
"Hella hella hella hella"
See? 6 degrees of helladom. Fall into one, you will fall through the rest.
I've heard it called both words in California. However, more often or not, "arroyo" is a proper noun usually referring to a place called "Arroyo ______" like "Arroyo Grande" I think the same holds true in Arizona as well (at least when I lived there)
Sadly, this is just the state of our pathetic, idiocracy of a society we have.
Ever watch local TV interviews, or even interviews with young celebs? All you hear is 'Like' in every other word. People are getting more and more stupid everyday and instead of actually speaking like an intelligent human being, they fill that void with garbage words like 'hella', 'like' and whatnot.
I want to get a shock collar, put it around any 14 yr old girl in America and go to town zapping her everytime 'like' flies out her mouth.
"Like, we went to Mat's this weekend, and I got there and there was like, nobody there I was like "Wow". There were like only like 4 people there. It was like dead."
Sadly, this is just the state of our pathetic, idiocracy of a society we have.
Ever watch local TV interviews, or even interviews with young celebs? All you hear is 'Like' in every other word. People are getting more and more stupid everyday and instead of actually speaking like an intelligent human being, they fill that void with garbage words like 'hella', 'like' and whatnot.
I want to get a shock collar, put it around any 14 yr old girl in America and go to town zapping her everytime 'like' flies out her mouth.
"Like, we went to Mat's this weekend, and I got there and there was like, nobody there I was like "Wow". There were like only like 4 people there. It was like dead."
Well, to be fair, every place and time has some sort of colloquialisms that older people don't generally like or understand. However, I don't really see how the use of one word signals anything besides the use of that one word.
Perhaps it tapers off with age, but you know what it feels like to be a teenager. You're pretty oblivious to the world. Hell, I'm in my early 20s, and I'm BARELY realizing how the real world is, and how polished people expect you to be.
I use the word "like" a lot in my speech because I never got castigated for it. I grew up around a lot of people who used the word a lot as well, and my parents didn't know enough about how contemporary English is used to understand. I used to lie to them about what some words meant so I can get away with saying it as much as possible (until one of my siblings blackmailed me, of course)
I'm sure when I have kids, I'll complain about the things they say. I just don't like hella because it sounds like a half-curse. I don't half-curse..I go for the full thing for the full effect. MAN!
As a linguist, I'm used to well-researched explanations of language phenomena such as "like" falling on deaf ears; most people have such viscerally strong opinions towards linguistic features or different accents that they can't be bothered to stop and think about the underlying linguistic motivations for these new features. The age old lament has always been, since the dawn of human speech: "Oh, young people are massacring our language! They can't even form coherent sentences anymore!"
This has been the same line from older generations and language purists for centuries. But the truth is that language is a constant state of flux, and any attempt to stifle new features in speech will ultimately be overcome by the overwhelming and inevitable force of natural linguistic change. If we didn't allow change to occur, then we would still be speaking the now-incomprehensible Old English of Beowulf (or an even more ancient linguistic ancestor).
What older generations and language purists fail to understand is that new forms such as "like" are not merely mindless fillers, but rather serve a wide variety of pragmatic functions. Some of these are explained simply here. In some cases, "like" has filled a pragmatic role that was formerly empty, allowing young people to express more nuance (such as hedging) than was previously possible (without resorting to a string of polysyllabic, academic words that would sound funny or pretentious in casual speech).
In other cases, "like" has simply replaced an older form that has become less common. This is most noticeable for the quotative function: when most young people are recounting a previously made statement, they'll often say something such as - "And I was like, '....'." Older generations, on the other hand, would more commonly say, "And I said ..." or "And I say ..." or "And I says ...", etc.
Note that these latter options have not been lost completely in the speech of young people. They merely have a new option at their disposal: the quotative "be like." Language behaves a lot like fashion - new forms are constantly coming in and out of fashion, and young people are constantly attempting to define and distinguish themselves from their parents' generation. Their parents did the same thing, and were equally chastised for speaking "improperly" or "stupidly."
As with fashion, young women and girls are almost always the pioneers of language changes. So it's no coincidence that "like" is used so commonly by adolescent girls. However, as adolescents mature and begin to feel less pressure to conform with their peers, they often decrease their usage of these super-innovative linguistic forms. Still, frequently using "like" for a variety of functions has absolutely no empirical correlation to that speaker's intelligence.
There have been pop v soda threads and maps posted here on CD in the past. Pop is pretty common throughout the midwest and also here in CO, also W. PA and W. NY.
Location: Cleveland bound with MPLS in the rear-view
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