Touron is Hella Funny

In early 2010, Austin Sendek of UC Davis created a petition encouraging the International System of Units to designate “hella” as the prefix for 10 to the power of 27, following “yotta” which of course represents 10 to the power of 24.

For a freelance writer I must have a pretty meagre grasp of English because I always thought Hella was a well-known car components company. Apparently not. The term “hella” has been used since 1993 in the States, especially California (surely not), as a slang intensifier derived from a contraction of “hell of a …” or “hell of a lot of …” Now, it just means “really” or “very” or “so”.

Thus, you get things like, “That’s hella cool, duuuuuuuude.” I know … how irritating.

It seems I was also wrong with “yotta”. I always thought it was Italian. “Thatta izza my yotta. You toucha my yotta, I breaka your face.”

Anyway, it’s possibly a sign of my age that I cannot embrace such linguistic developments, and will definitely not be working them into my freelance writing projects. Perhaps if I wasn’t hella long in the tooth …

Personally, I don’t want a trendy young gentleman – I hesitate to validate the word “dude” – from California cultivating his sinister (and largely successful) plan to make me feel outmoded. I’ve only just become comfortable with using the eighties word “trendy”, although I gather that fell out of favour in the early nineties.

I certainly think there is a place for made-up words. If something new is discovered, like a planet or a new drug or a new haircut, you need a name for it. If I discover a new planet, I’m not going to name it “the one that looks a lot like Saturn”. I just don’t see why a word like “really” needs a replacement. It already does a hella good job of saying what it means. (Did I just use “hella” again? Damn.)

I also don’t understand the ridiculous practice of renaming or rephrasing previously perfectly identifiable things to make them sound grander than they are. I saw an email the other day that assured the person would “monitor and track the conversations through the ecosystem”. Was this a missive from Sir David Attenborough on the mating calls of a group of chimps? No, it meant the person would look out for stuff on the internet.

Train companies in the UK are terrible for this. Once upon a time, the ticket inspector would trudge through the carriage clipping tickets whilst you listened to an announcement that the next station is Birmingham; the train will shortly be arriving at Birmingham.

Not any more. Now, the Revenue Protection Executive patrols his domain whilst it is announced that the next station stop is Birmingham; the train will shortly be arriving into Birmingham.

I was okay with the first version. I understood perfectly well. I didn’t need the added clarification that the next station would be a “stop”. My assumption has always been that if I see a station platform whizzing by outside the window at 100 miles an hour, the train isn’t actually stopping there and I probably shouldn’t attempt to disembark the bloody thing. And why change “at” to “into”? Why? Why? WHY?

Having said all that, I have been known to make words up. It’s called artistic licence. I’m allowed that privilege because I’m a time-honoured freelance writer, dontcha know. Every so often, a word will pop into my head that so aptly describes what I want to say, I just have to use it. It usually describes a combination of two elements that doesn’t already possess a suitable label. That’s as far as it goes, though; as yet, I haven’t petitioned to have any included in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The best made-up word I’ve ever heard is “touron”. I wish I could claim credit for it myself, but I heard it whilst visiting Yellowstone nearly 25 years ago. (It’s listed in the Urban Dictionary and is linked there to the Yosemite National Park.)

My travelling buddy and I were chatting to a park employee who was telling us about the idiots he had to deal with every day. He pointed to an almost sheer scree slope descending into a river and said he liked to tell the tourons that it was a bear slide and they’d just missed one hit the water. He’d leave them staring at the slope for hours, cameras poised, waiting for another bear to take the plunge.

“Touron?” we enquired.

Cross a tourist with a moron.