I hope this won't seem too much off topic, but there are so many great
memories in this group, I was wondering if anyone might be able to
help me with a slightly different sort of psycho-archeology. Or, really,
linguistic archeology, to be precise.

My wife, who is actually from England, and myself, who did grow up in Berkeley,
are trying to work out some of the early history of the slang word "hella" --
as in, "that was some hella gnarly shit" or "we are hella gonna be there" or
"there were hella many people at the party".

If you didn't already know, it's appears that this construction began life
sometime in the mid 1970's--perhaps as early as 1976, perhaps even earlier,
and it spread out from somewhere in Berkeley or Oakland. By now this construction
is fairly well known as a characteristic of Northern California slang. What we're
interested in though is not so much where or when exacly it began, but what
were the ways it was used back in the old days.

So, what we're looking for are real, recorded examples from the late 70's or early 80's--
things that you might have in a journal that you kept back then, or in a letter you got
from a friend, or in a poem or a song you have from back then. Basically anything, so
long as you (and we) can be really sure that it really was used *exactly* that way, way
back then. Anything, that is, so long as it is a real quotation of actual usage, and not just
the way you remember people using it.

Though, really, I guess we'd be interested in people's memories too, however fallible they might
be. What we want to understand is how the use of this form changed over the years,
and in particular, what the earliest sorts of uses might have included.

It's a funny question, I know, but it's a serious one too, at least for us. This is the
sort of thing, or one sort of thing at least, that linguists will worry about.

Anyway, if anyone can help us out in any way we will be, of course,
hella grateful.

We totally will.