That simply means they have a very large baby bump. It does not mean that they are "more pregnant" than a lady with a smaller bump. Pregnancy is a binary state.
Of course. The point still stands - a person either is, or is not, in state of pregnancy.
I think that, from context, it was clear I was using "pregnancy" to mean "the state of being pregnant" and not referring to the nine month gestation period.
That'll teach me to contribute to pedantry-focussed subthreads. :-)
Pretty much nothing is binary. Pregnancy is only approximately binary. Whether you're right or wrong about it certainly isn't. And nobody uses language in a binary manner.
This study provides the first detailed account of perceptual dialectology within California (as well as one of the first accounts of perceptual dialectology within any single state). Quantitative analysis of a map-labeling task carried out in Southern California reveals that California's most salient linguistic boundary is between the northern and southern regions of the state. Whereas studies of the perceptual dialectology of the United States as a whole have focused almost exclusively on regional dialect differences, respondents associated particular regions of California less with distinctive dialects than with differences in language (English versus Spanish), slang use, and social groups. The diverse sociolinguistic situation of California is reflected in the emphasis both on highly salient social groups thought to be stereotypical of California by residents and nonresidents alike (e.g., surfers) and on groups that, though prominent in the cultural landscape of the state, remain largely unrecognized by outsiders (e.g., hicks).
[...]
By far, the most frequently remarked-upon slang term in the map-labeling data
was hella, accounting for 47.4 percent of the slang and other lexical labels. Hella is
a slang term originating in Northern California and one that remains—aside from a
few brief moments in the national spotlight due to its circulation in popular culture—
largely restricted to that region (Bucholtz 2006). The term, which apparently lexicalized
from (a) hell of (a), functions as both a quantifier (There were hella people
there) and an intensifier (He runs hella fast). Four respondents also mentioned the
slang term hecka, the G-rated equivalent of hella, but this term was not counted
separately, because tokens of hecka always co-occurred with hella.
For Southern Californians in particular, hella represents a crucial shibboleth separating
the two major regions of the state. As shown in Figure 7, respondents tended
to identify hella overwhelmingly as a Northern California slang term, and its appearance
in other regions of the map drops dramatically from north to south.
Thus Northern California was variously labeled the hellas, Land of the Hella’s,
and Hella capital, and one respondent provided an isogloss designating “the ‘hella’
line.” (In the map data, the Central Coast around Santa Barbara seemed to be the
dividing line between users and nonusers of hella, and the fact that the study was
conducted in this region may have enhanced respondents’ focus on this particular
issue.) [*10: The respondent’s confusion may also be due to the existence of the Crips, a notorious Los
Angeles–based gang.] Hella users were also negatively evaluated by Southern Californians, and
the term came in for a good deal of criticism, such as Hella is not a real word and
[hecka is] probably the worst word ever.
