Hellawhat?

I love it. A colloquialism that my sources tell me is peculiar to Northern California is making a bid for academic respectability. The word "hella" and its companion euphemism "hecka" are commonly used by young people in this region to denote large numbers or quantities, or as a synonym for "very" or "extremely," as in, "There were hella people at the concert," or "That's hella bad."

I was greatly (hella) amused, therefore, to see an article in today's paper recounting the efforts of a U.C. Davis student to promote the word as a numerical prefix indicating the order of magnitude 10 to the 27th power. Thus a computing capacity of one times 10 to the 27 bytes would officially be a hellabyte.

 You could still have hella bytes in a more informal sense of course, especially if you slept outside in summer without a mosquito net, but there would be only one specific quantity officially designated as a hellabyte. Likewise with hellawatts, hellatons and, of course, hellacopters (very large rotary-winged aircraft).