The word hun is over

Once upon a time, hun was no more than an unassuming term of endearment.

Your Nan no doubt used it when she asked if you wanted your pyjamas warming on the Aga, or extra ice cream with your apple pie. Your nursery school teacher probably used it when you fell over in the playground, so did the doctor when you had that gammy ear aged five.

That’s all it ever was. Then you went to high school, got overly hyped up over your first lipgloss and unsupervised trips out shopping with your new gal pals, and suddenly decided you were more than old enough to start using it yourself.

It infiltrated year seven corridors and MSN names everywhere: “Hun can I nab a bit of your Impulse please?”, “What’ve you got after PE third lesson hun?”, “Hun I cannot wait to hit New Look this weekend!”.

Of course, hun eventually died a death around 2006, along with flip up phones, ice pops at school discos and Leona Lewis.

Several hun-less years passed, and life went on just fine, then Grimmy got his breakfast show and before we know it’s everywhere again. Unlike other draining vocabulary trends of our time, “on point”, “fleek” and “dope” just to name a handful, hun isn’t restricted to a particular social collective, everyone’s at it and that’s what makes it so deadly.

Granted, added onto the end of a pithy comment or sarcastic one line, hun did work at first. But now it’s more than that, we all use it so freely that no one even knows what it means anymore, it’s this ambiguous hybrid of meanings.

No quicker than it rolls off the tongue is it acquiring bizarre, almost cult  like status. The streets of Shoreditch are littered with ghastly “u okay hun” t-shirts and nauseatingly quirky coffee shop boards emboldened with those dreaded three letters. If it isn’t already, it’s just a sad matter of time before it’s all over everything from Primarni baby grows to hun stamped pills.

We’ve allowed it to creep back into our lives in what we assume is this ironic appropriation of our high school tween selves. We tell ourselves that if we claim back our previous misgivings and team them with a denim shirt and a Red Stripe, it’s no longer tragic: it’s cool, it’s 2015.

But do we sit around playing snake on Nokia 3310’s and watching CITV because we want to bring it back? No we don’t, because some things are better left in the past, and hun is absolutely one of them.