Oddly, the word “hella” causes a fair amount of tension still at UC Santa Cruz. UCSC is poised right between Northern and Southern California. Every year, a new batch of freshman from Southern California merges with frosh from the North- especially Sacramento, where my informal investigations lead me to believe "hella’ is most prevelent. This leads to a lot of whining on the part of the SoCal folks, who often for some reason take great offense to “hella”. It often tops the list of people’s complaints about their roomates.
Some Southern California people say it, and it’s certainly not rare in the Bay Area (although they tend towards “hell of”, but in Sacramento, almost everyone says it without thinking about it- even people a good generation older than I. I was shocked to go to school in Santa Cruz and learn that this word that has always been an intuitive instinctual part of my vocabulary was not used universally.
Oddly, my investigations found that the other place where “hella” is used widely is Georgia.
If you think about it, it’s kind of a useful word. It conveys both “many” and “very” (which are related in meaning) effectively. It’s kind of an all purpose empahsizer that rolls easliy off the tongue (especially if you have a good Northern California slur). I still havn’t figured out why “hella” would mean that. The term comes from “Hell of” (which conveys “very” but not “many”). “Hell of” in turn likly comes from “Hell of a” (which means…ummm…well that something is whatever it is to an extreme degree). But what the heck does it mean to eat “one hell of a sandwich”? Why do you need to bring the underworld into things? The sentence doesn’t make any sense.
All I can think is that “Hell of a” once only described events, so if you say it was “one hell of a party”, you are describing a party that approximated the place of eternal torment.
