Slang words only West Coasters will understand
There is a certain kind of linguistic confidence that grows up between the Sierra Nevada and the Pacific Ocean. West Coast slang was not born out of any single city or decade. It originated in surf culture, hip-hop, the Bay Area’s particular strain of African American vernacular, the San Fernando Valley and the laid-back assurance that wherever you are right now is essentially the center of the universe.
The terms below come from Let’s Learn Slang, Word Smarts and Wikipedia. If any of them needs an explanation, you are probably from somewhere else.
Seven of the most telling ones, below.
Hella
The Bay Area’s most famous export. According to UC Berkeley, hella first appeared in Northern California in the late 1970s and has remained firmly associated with the Bay Area since. It functions as a pure intensifier: hella good, hella cold, hella people at the party. Southern Californians are aware of it but seldom use it.
The 405
Only in Southern California does a freeway get a definite article. According to Wikipedia, the 405 is known colloquially by that name to Southern California residents — the “the” before a freeway number being one of the most distinctly SoCal linguistic habits in the country. Nobody in the rest of America takes “the I-80.” In Los Angeles, you take the 405. It is less a road than a shared trauma.
Gnarly
Born in surf culture and meaning something impressively extreme or dangerously so, depending on tone. Let’s Learn Slang notes that gnarly is one of the oldest surviving pieces of California surfing vocabulary. A gnarly wave and a gnarly car crash are both gnarly. Context does the rest.
Stoked
There is an emotion somewhere between excited and grateful, with a physical quality that words like “thrilled” or “pumped” do not quite capture. According to Word Smarts, stoked originates in surf and snow culture and has remained the word of choice since the 1960s. You can be stoked about a concert, a meal or an unexpectedly decent parking spot. The word does not differentiate between magnitudes.
Hyphy
Oakland gave hip-hop many things, and hyphy is one of the more precisely geographical ones. Popularized by Oakland rapper Keak da Sneak, Wikipedia confirms it means hyperactive or wild in the best possible sense. Its peak was the mid-2000s Bay Area rap scene, but the word travels further than most people expect.
The Valley
If you have to ask which valley, you are not from Los Angeles. The San Fernando Valley, beyond the Santa Monica Mountains, is simply the Valley to everyone in the LA area. As Let’s Learn Slang, it carries cultural connotations the way borough names do in New York: a specific relationship to the city, to traffic and to heat that runs 20 degrees hotter than the rest of LA.
Bomb
Not a weapon but a compliment. On the West Coast, particularly in California, something that is “bomb” is excellent, exceptional, or worth going out of your way for. Let’s Learn Slang notes it has been part of West Coast urban vocabulary since the 1980s. A taco can be bomb. So can an outfit or a parking spot in Santa Monica on a Saturday afternoon.
The bottom line
West Coast slang is Northern California and Southern California, surf culture and hip-hop, the Bay Area and Los Angeles, speaking across 800 miles of coastline. What ties it together is a shared tendency to describe extreme things casually and to treat the geography as a language that outsiders can study but never quite speak fluently.
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