I've recently used the term 'Swine flu' casually and been corrected to 'H1N1', but those four syllables don't quite bounce off my tongue yet. (The Dutch are apparently calling it the 'new flu', which would work better.) In this conversation, though, the topic came up and the health care worker said more or less this: "Oh yeah, we've decided that H1N1 will be pronounced 'Heinie'." Hey, that's gotta be leet speak, right?
Map from here.
8 comments:
When people speak of H1N1, I always think of the 1918 flu pandemic, which was also an H1N1 strain. What can I say? I'm an old fart who has read too much history.
The upside of being old is that we're more likely immune to this round of things, right? What can I say: I'm an old fart who has lived too much history.
I dunno. Heinie flu sounds like a real pain in the butt.
The Japanese are calling it 'new flu'too.
Wouldn't pronouncing H1N1 just be a leet-ish case of acronym--i.e. pronouncing an abbreviation? (Retro-leeting?) I've always taken leet to be the use of numerals and other characters and spellings to produce cheesy faux-hackerisms: newbie is noob is n00b, porn is pr0n, owned is pwned, leet is l33t, etc. The sound and original word remain in relative tact, but are encoded through silly characters. So for H1N1, the leet cycle would be: start with a word like hini ("hi-nigh"?) and spell it H1N1.
Or swinezors. That's be leet.
Yeah, maybe. You're definitely right about the reverse angle of things, but I think 20 years ago, people wouldn't have thought about calling 'H1N1' 'heinie'.
Unrelated: Re-reading my comment, I just realized that I've re-analyzed "intact" as "in tact" and thus can say "in relative tact" without batting an eye!
Mr Verb, were you really around 81 years ago to be exposed to pandemic H1N1? If not, you probably have no antibodies for it.
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