An exclamation in fact, an exclamation that flings all who hear against the far wall of a room, an exclamation that makes its presence felt in a conversation like no other. And yet, and this is its strength, an incredulous question as well. What other word does this with the ease a small child whishes down a water slide?
I have used hien often in this column, it is like going into bold capitals, though I have also used it as a segue to crawl out of a hole I have incomprehensibly dug myself into. A new topic can be started after hien and nobody asks the ombudsman to release the reasons why.
The word is, needless to say, French, and not only is Colbert a ferociously French name, but I have one French paper passed in my now-obsolete three-fourths of a university degree.
My mother had a master's honours degree in this same tongue. It is probably a miracle I speak any English at all. And it is no wonder I use the word hien maybe, well, let's think, 40 times a day?
No?
Well, 30 then. Oui, c'est vrai.
D'accord. Last Wednesday, a Chinese woman, when emailing me in an otherwise grammatically unimpeachable message, ended with the exclamation hein! I was grateful to find error in her normal needlessly witty snottily superior prose and quickly advised her the word was hien, calling on my cultural heritage and the academic qualifications of mother and son.
Outrageously, she came back claiming similar academic prowess, and, far worse, after the fork-in-the-heart comment were my mother still alive, insisted the spelling was hein.
Normally, I just cut people like this off my friendship list.
Only a lesser man argues when he is incontrovertibly correct, and there are already far too many fools on this planet making even queuing at a post office a task that grinds teeth to lint. As Ibsen said in Critic last week, to live is to battle with trolls, a thought all of us should have tattooed on the back of our hands. But one has to learn to accommodate trolls, and as there was nothing on the telly that day, I gently reminded my stubborn Chinese friend that if we were talking word endings, and indeed we were, then ein derives from German, not French, which I thought was a kind way of handing out a severe semantic slapping without causing offence. But incredibly she slammed the word Seine down on the table, a fleuve en Paris, then claimed Google and four online dictionaries confirmed that hein had legs, and hien did not exist.
It is a terrible terrible thing to find out you have been wrong all your life. I can only compare it with finding out there was no tooth fairy (which a nasty boy told me when I was 12) or that Rachel Hunter still loves Rod Stewart (New Zealand's Got Talent, the Sunday before last).
And, of course, then you have to front up to the people you have called lying swine, like my Chinese friend, plus the rest of the human race, which, in view of the fact I have used hien 30 times a day all my life, taking off the first two months, when I was barely talking at all, means I have nearly 700,000 conversational incidents to apologise for. Quite a lot, as legendary local sports broadcaster Peter Sellers (91) once said live on air in a slightly more profane way when talking about meat pies.
My Chinese friend and I are now conversing solely in French, hers dripping in the kind of smirk the French reserve for the English, not the Chinese for the common Kiwi.
It has been a humiliating time. I still like hien enormously. It sounds like what it is, it LOOKS French, and when used as an incredulous question with the appropriate nasal sneer, it can melt concrete.
I intend to continue using it 30 times a day.
- Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
