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This has been a NorCal phrase since I first visited in 1983 as a sophomore in HS. At that time it was so very cool and West Coast sounding to my ears, and inst
by tanseydavid 6y ago
This has been a NorCal phrase since I first visited in 1983 as a sophomore in HS. At that time it was so very cool and West Coast sounding to my ears, and instantly understandable in context.
Kids with stricter upbringings had to settle for saying "Hecka" which is still funny to me.
Interesting side-note: the same Cali kids that introduced me to the slang word "Hella" also used the word "tight" as a slang word with negative connotation, as in:
"My parent's grounded me for a month"
"Oh man, that's hella TIGHT"
But over the years "tight" has managed to flip to a positive connotation and mean 'cool', 'sweet' etc.
"Hella" still means "HELLA" though.
- chronomex 6y agoIf "hella" is 10^27 then clearly "hecka" would be the correct name for 10^-27.
- garmaine 6y agoYou’d better add that to the proposal!
- andrewia 6y agoThe exact same things were alive and well in the suburbs of Sacramento circa 2010. Lots of "hecka" and the coolest kids could say "hella".
- Tokkemon 6y agoI remember a lot of that in Modesto back then.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoAs someone from SoCal, hella was always a NorCal colloquialism. I grew up around actual 'valley girls' and the associated slang, lots of silly things. Even after all of that, hella always sounded off to me.
- edoceo 6y agoLike. Totally.
- Stratoscope 6y agoMy favorite north-south California variation is whether we use "the" on a freeway name or number. In the north, it's "highway 101" or just "101"; in the south it's "the 101 freeway" or just "the 101". I've always wondered where the terminology changes over. I think it may be somewhere around King City?
- tanseydavid 6y agoLOL -- here's a clip from 30 Rock with Liz Lemon doing a flashback to her time in Los Angeles (during the Rodney King riots) and making a joke about referring to freeways in the SoCal manner of "The 10" rather than "10" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lc3peq4P5s&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lc3peq4P5s&feature=emb_logo
- jrussino 6y agoIt’s also one of the things that was satirized in the SNL “Californians” skits: https://youtu.be/Tt-tG6ufH90 https://youtu.be/Tt-tG6ufH90
- 6y ago
- dheera 6y agoAs a programmer in northern California I would much rather NorCal be called NoCal, to be consistent with SoCal. Or change SoCal to SouCal. Pick one or the other. I hate naming inconsistencies. How would you like if I wrote code like: for pixel_x in range(image.width): for pix_y in range(image.height): ...
- asveikau 6y agoI would say it's better to iterate on y first because line at the time is more sequential access than column at a time. I noticed that before the naming inconsistency.
- dheera 6y agoEh it depends on what you're doing with it. If you're doing some kind of convolution type thing that is going to access a whole lot of nearby pixels in all directions, it doesn't really matter. Also there are times I like to store "images" such that accessing image[x,y] yields (x,y) as if the image were placed in the 1st quadrant, which makes code easier to read and more intuitive. In that case the outer irritation being x-wise and the inner irritation being y-wise is faster. I absolutely hate those irritating image[height-y, x] type bullshit appearing all over my code. If you want readability image[x, y] should be (x,y) with the origin at the lower left as it always is in grade school. (I hate the people who invented matrices for putting 0,0 at the top left and inverting the y-axis.)
- remolacha 6y agoBut when speaking, having phonetic distance between related words helps prevent confusion. In a noisy environment, you can mishear just the first consonant in "NoCal" and get "SoCal". With "NorCal", you have to mishear multiple phonemes. This phonetic distance/information redundancy is built into the NATO phonetic alphabet. It's also one way that linguists explain "chain shifts" in speech sounds.
- vmception 6y agoNow saying "Cali" means you're either greater than or equal to Gen-X or not from/living in California at all. It honestly makes me wince. But I'll concede to a counterpoint that there is rarely a reason to say California when you are in California, as "norcal" and "socal" and other regions are said more often.
- tanseydavid 6y agoWince away -- I am fully Gen-X and I have lived in the Bay Area for 36 years but came here from Ohio... I love the wince that I get back from use of this word. When I am in a really ornery mood I will freely drop "San Fran" and even "Frisco" sometimes just to get stimulate that holier-than-thou-Bay-Area attitude. It never gets old...
- vmception 6y agolol trolling is always fun but yeah “Bay Area” is an example of a region that will come up in conversation more than “Cali”