"Hells, yeah ! "

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 1/3/06, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> On 1/3/06, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > Watch the videogame commercial here:
> >
> >   http://gameads.gamepressure.com/tv_game_commercial.asp?ID=3494
> >
> >   and tell me why the characters are saying " Hells, yeah ! " instead of
> > the universally known " Hell, yeah ! "
> >
> >   How long has this weird pluralization been going on ? How many Hells must
> > we worry about now ?
>
> Urban Dictionary has the interjection "hells" from Jan. 2004, with
> other variations following [...]

But who needs Urban Dictionary? The Usenet archive has "hells yeah"
back to Nov. 15, 1994 (on alt.music.hardcore):

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.music.hardcore/msg/d88fc705259dff74

And the Original Hip Hop Lyrics Archive gives an example from the
title track of Big Daddy Kane's 1993 album "Looks Like A Job For..."

-----
http://www.ohhla.com/anonymous/bigdaddy/looklike/looklike.bdk.txt
The king of combat, my competition scat
Pockets stay fat, oh hells yeah, I'm alllll that
-----


--Ben Zimmer