A few days ago, a friend mentioned the /hájni/ virus, referring to the H1N1 flu virus, but treating “H1N1” as if it were a piece of leetspeak, with the numeral 1 standing for the letter I, the whole thing pronounced like the North American slang word for ‘buttocks’ (a shortened variant of behind, in combination with the suffix -y). There’s even a t-shirt (and a sweatshirt), on sale here:
The t-shirt uses one of the variant spellings of the buttocks word. The OED entry (draft of December 2006) for the word (which notes that it’s frequently a euphemistic substitute for ass and has cites from 1922 on) gives four spellings: heinie, heiny, hiney, and hinie. Though the OED treats heinie as the main spelling, when the buttocks word appears in combination with virus and flu, the hiney spelling (as on the t-shirt) is by far the most frequent in Google hits. The ordering of the OED‘s spelling variants is the same for X virus and X flu: hiney first, then (well behind it) heinie, then hinie, then heiny. In addition, there are some occurrences of the spellings heiney and hiny.
December 21, 2009 at 11:43 am |
Also see heenee, HeeNee, hini, HINI for the virus.