Northern California is already represented in scientific lingo by two elements (Californium and Berkelium) on the periodic table. If a University of California physics student gets his way, though, one of the region’s most annoying slang terms will become a bona fide scientific term.
Austin Sendek is pushing for “hella,” insidious NoCal parlance for “very,” to be an officially recognized scientific-unit prefix representing the magnitude of 1.0x1027. Sendek apparently never got the memo that the rest of the country hates people who say “hella.”
SoCal’s Gwen Stefani and No Doubt introduced the rest of the world to the uniquely irritating term in 2002 with the song “Hella Good.” Four years before that, the animated series South Park derided users of “hella” and alerted us to the word’s malignancy in the episode “Spooky Fish,” in which Eric Cartman uttered it four times in a roughly ten-second time span.
The idea for hella- came to Sendek in a physics lab when his female partner said there were “hella volts” in an electric field. “We started thinking that it’d be pretty funny if a hellavolt was a real thing, or a hellameter or hellagram,” Sendek said.
No, it wouldn’t be funny. In fact, it’d likely all but ensure that recreational marijuana would never be legalized in California.
Sendek chose that particular number for a reason. While most people are familiar with prefixes representative of smaller numbers, like mega- (1.0x106, or 1 million) and giga- (1.0x109, or 1 billion), only one magnitude greater than 1.0x1024 (yotta-) has an official name. The number 1.0x10100 was dubbed a googol in 1938, 60 years before Larry Page and Sergey Brin named their upstart search engine after it (with an alternate spelling, of course).
Sendek started the Facebook group “The Official Petition to establish ‘Hella-’ as the SI Prefix for 10^27” as a joke. Once the number of fans began to explode after a reporter from The Sacramento Bee stumbled upon it, however, Sendek began advocating his cause on radio shows around the globe. Articles about his effort have been seen on websites for major news outlets like ABC and Fox News.
Sendek is so serious about pushing for hella-, he plans to launch a website at hellapetition.com.
So what started as an inside joke involving vernacular despised by a vast majority of Americans has become an earnest undertaking by a Cal-Davis undergrad. Is there any doubt he’s a massive tool?
Austin Sendek
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