Published 2010-09-28T16:34:00Z”/>
Nick Pike
It wasn’t until I heard around eight “hellas” in a two-minute period while talking with my roommates for the first time that I realized I was farther from home than I thought.
To my surprise, my roommates looked at me as if Spicoli had just washed up on their doorstep between all the “epics,” “gnarlies” and other Southern slang I regularly used.
Between the strange words, the sea of Giants hats on campus and a type of hip-hop I still don’t know to spell – I think its hyphy – I felt like a fish out of water.
However, I’m not one to judge and I adapted to my new culture by making plenty of friends despite the “slanguage” barrier.
Nonetheless, after my first few weeks attending Chico State, I noticed an animosity present when it came to being from a certain half of the state, and it hasn’t seemed to fade.
Those of us who migrated from the dry half of the state thought Northerners talked and dressed funny, and those who resided in the north state viewed us Southern folk as a tad peculiar.
It’s as if we’ve brought the Civil War back from the dead, sans muskets and burlap threads.
Personally I might have to change sides. The south may have the beaches, but the north has the freshwater supply.
This oh-so-serious turf war has made me wonder – what happens to the guys in Central California?
Do they get to choose what side they want to be on, or is there a defining boundary that divides the state perfectly in half, making Cen Cal obsolete?
Maybe they get to be neutral like Switzerland and just get the best of both worlds.
To be honest, I’d bet most of us probably don’t know very much about our adversary’s territory, and they aren’t too privy to our culture either.
Ironically, many group those from So Cal as being a population of very similar people, when it is actually a huge region with distinctly different subcultures.
Similarly, anyone living north of Big Sur is deemed from Nor Cal and is given the stereotype of the Bay Area, when in reality a vast array of cultures from the city to the farms and the mountains are present.
The biggest factor that causes the negative vibes is the intimidation of different norms.
The last time I last heard a person badmouth Orange County, which is where I grew up, I simply asked them why, and they had no response other than “It’s full of tools and pretty boys.”
I asked if they had ever been to the area or anywhere remotely near there and found they had no frame of reference other than what a TV show depicted it to be.
I’ve heard shallow assumptions like these thrown around on a regular basis from both sides of the Golden State.
The fact of the matter is that we express ourselves differently, from rhetoric to tastes and outer appearance, and that’s what makes a place like Chico such a diverse community.
When it came down to deciding if I wanted to go to college a stone’s throw away from home with all those friends I had made in high school, or to pack my life into my pickup and head due north for nine hours to a new world where I had zero friends, I didn’t hesitate.
Without a melting pot of different styles, slang and expressions, we’d be just another strip mall of a student body.
So embrace the fact that not everyone loves your sports team, that your significant other may use slang that makes nails on a chalkboard sound sexy or that the music you listen to may never get played at the party.
Separation by an invisible line hardly validates hostility, and it’s the variety in culture which makes our state so special.
Nick Pike can be reached at
