[_5659]

For the uninitiated, hella is flexible as a quantifier and intensifier. Hella has hella meanings for hella words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hella

Honestly, being from the Bay Area, I'm against pegging hella to a specific size. It feels more appropriate for cases where you don't know how many, but 'a lot' feels insufficient.

[caturopath]

IME, the hella intensifier ("That run was hella dangerous") is really widespread, but the quantifier ("There were hella trees") is really a northern California thing.

[Lammy]

I always said "hell of" instead of hella if I wanted to be cool like Ray Smuckles http://achewood.com/index.php?date=11242004

[jdminhbg]

If you are with a lady and have Taken a DVD, you can tone it down with “heck of.” http://achewood.com/index.php?date=06212004

[m463]

> "hella is flexible as a quantifier and intensifier"

This is too funny.

It is such a concise and accurate description of such an informal word that you wonder if the describer could ever use it in conversation.

I am not making fun of you!

A similar example is the description of "Working in the Coal Mine" in Wikipedia:

"Written, arranged and produced by Toussaint, the song concerns the suffering of a man who rises before 5 o'clock each morning in order to work in a coal mine, five days a week, where the conditions are very harsh and dangerous, but which offers the only prospect of paid employment. The singer repeatedly asks the Lord, "How long can this go on?" and complains that when the weekend arrives, he's too exhausted to have any fun. In the instrumental section, as in the song's fade, he says: "Lord, I'm so tired / How long can this go on?"

[chaboud]

If I'm still alive when someone says "hecka hellabytes", I'll shed a single wistful tear, for humanity will have run its course...

[awalton]

'Hecka-' sounds like the giggle-unit version of the 'Hella-'. So let's propose a heckabyte is 1024 yobibytes.

[npunt]

Agree. If we're to peg Hella to anything, it should be as an intensifier to the one's expectations.

E.g. 'there's hella people here' would indicate there are say ~5x the number of people that the listener expects there to be in a given place and time.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

Would you say hella has a ton of different meanings? "Ton" seems to do fine with precise and imprecise meanings.

[edoceo]

Too heavy man.

[vmception]

It just adds an additional context.

A "minute" simultaneously means 60 seconds which is brief, and in casual conversation it means an indefinitely indeterminate long period of time.

We can distinguish perfectly fine.