Further Evidence of the Decline of the English Language

The part of the world that turned "google" into a verb, and gave the world the means to carry out that action, may be on the cusp of adding to the world's scientific lexicon. There is a movement afoot to give a name to numbers of 27 orders of magnitude (27 zeros after the initial digit). The proposed appellation is "hella," a slang term that has its roots in San Francisco, which means, simply, "a lot."

This dubious development is brought to us not by the news parody site The Onion, but is instead a real campaign by a Cal physics student to petition the International Committee for Weights and Measures to add "hella" to the International System of Units. The student is getting his message out to the people through that venerated method of social change: a Facebook petition.

There is no truth to the rumor that a high school English teacher/surfing instructor from Santa Cruz has started a Twitter campaign to convince the Oxford English dictionary to change the superlative form of "better" from "best" to "most epic."

Yet.