A hella cool pop in the city...

In California, one of the biggest culture shocks I had to endure did not involve anything involving a landmark or a saying, although those certainly could cause confusion to anybody visiting or a newbie Californian like myself.

I mentioned before that I worked in San Francisco as a video game tester. While I worked there nearly every day and visited San Francisco off and on with my wife when I wasn't working, it wasn't until after I left the state that I found out that people referred to San Francisco as "The City". My wife told me that you couldn't refer to it as "San Fran" or "Frisco" or anything close to it without people glaring at you. It was just "The City". Eddie Izzard, a British comedian known for dressing in drag onstage, taped his "Dressed to Kill" HBO special in San Francisco and noted that it sounded like snakes were in the audience from the people hissing when he didn't refer to San Francisco as "The City".

Looking on this now, it strikes me as odd that San Francisco got this designation. New York City is "The Big Apple", New Orleans is "The Big Easy", Los Angeles is "LA", but I never understood why San Francisco is so special that it out of any city in the country is "The City". It's still strange to me.

California is also the home for the term "Hella". I first heard the term on a South Park episode where Cartman, the fat kid, annoyed everyone in one episode by declaring everything "hella stupid", "hella lame" or "hella crazy". I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a joke on the California use of the term "Hella". If you look it up online, you'll see that "hella" is actually a slang term mainly used in the Northern California area. Some think it's a derived from the term "hell of a" meaning "very" or "a lot".

A lot of culture comes from California. For example, the Valley Girls with their own Valley Speak that once swept the nation. For some reason, Hella just has never caught on with the rest of the country. Not that they don't try.

I had seen the South Park episode years before my move to California. Suddenly, I became surrounded by it. At the video game company, some guys would declare things "hella cool" or "hella crazy". I thought it was rather funny to suddenly hear it all around me. Funnier yet, the kids that weren't allowed to say "Hell" substituted "Heck" at created "Hecka" for "Hella". I almost lost it in a video store when I heard that the first time. I heard a kid declare to his Mom that the movie he wanted to rent looked "hecka cool". I thought it was just that one kid, but I heard it several times after that, usually in a video store, by kids that weren't teenagers yet declaring anything and everything "hecka cool".

One of the hardest words for me to avoid saying lest I be labeled an outsider in California was the word, "Pop."

When I was working at that Pizza Hut for a few short weeks, I'd take people's orders over the phone and I'd ask them near the end, "Do you want any pop to go with that order?"
This was usually followed by a confused sounding, "What?"

I thought that maybe people had a hard time understanding me since I have a habit of mumbling, so I'd repeat with, "Do you want any soft drinks like Coke, Diet Coke, etc."
One night, it became clear to me why people were confused. I asked the "Pop" question during an order and the lady answered with a drink order. She then asked, "Are you from the Midwest?" I answered that I was indeed from the Midwest, Nebraska to be exact. She said, "I'm from Ohio. I figured you were from around there because I haven't heard the word "Pop" used in a while."

It became clearer at the video game company. They would stock free pops into a large cooler for us to drink. People called it "soda".

Now at this point, you're probably wondering what took me so long. I just had never heard people refer to products like Coke as "soda". All my life, it was "Pop" so forgive me if it took me a long time to figure out what term people used for their "sodas". I think it was when I would see guys get up and go, “Dude, do you want a soda?” or “Hey, they just restocked the sodas?” that I put 2 and 2 together to get to the “soda” variable.

Soda was a hard term for me to adopt. It felt weird to call soft drinks “soda” because in my mind, “soda” is the clear, flavorless stuff that you add to hard liquor to dilute it, like with a vodka and soda.

So I would find myself saying to my tester friends, “They just restocked the pop… err… soda cooler!” To which guys would give me a strange look as I had stepped off the train in San Francisco wearing overalls with a banjo on my knee and a piece of straw hanging out of my mouth.

While I did my best to adopt the “soda” slang, I was stymied by my wife at home. She refused to call the soft drinks we used “soda”. We’d be at the store buying our groceries and I’d say that we’d need some “soda” to which she’d either glare at me or glare and ask, “Oh, you mean, pop?”
She was bound and determined to get me to stop saying it, so I would have to remember to call it “Pop” at home, but then revert to the California term by using “Soda” while I was working in San Francisco.

I think my California co-workers were confused by it. One day, they asked for an explanation when I again made the unkind mistake of referring to their “soda” as “pop”.
“What’s this “Pop” thing all about?” one of them asked. I tried to explain that this how I’d always referred to soft drinks at home, but again they looked at me like I was a yokel. Thankfully, a co-worker who was originally from Ohio came to my defense.

“Hey, I’ll back Bob up on this. That’s what they call it in the Midwest. You don’t understand. It’s not as is this is just a local thing. It’s everywhere! The store aisles literally say, “Pop”. You’ll see a store ad in the newspaper and people will say, ‘Hey! Pop’s on sale!"

I should point out that when I was in California that a lot of guys that I worked with seemed to have no concept that there are other states outside of California save for Oregon and Arizona. Most never seemed to have traveled outside of California. Why should they? They have almost every pastime that you could want to do in California. Like tall trees? Go to the Muir Woods. Like hiking? There are plenty of hills. Like to surf? Go to the beach. Like to ski? Go to Lake Tahoe.

Because of this, the guys I worked with seemed genuinely shocked when they'd walk by me and I'd be listening to some music that they'd actually listen to. They looked like they wanted to ask, "So did you mug some Californian and steal his walkman?"

It sounds very stupid now that I write about this, and it is, but the soda story actually sets up my next story: How to lose weight and then gain it all back and then some by sitting on your but all day.