That would be an abbreviated interjection of “alright?” There was no hein in it…no nasalization of the terminal vowel…the context wouldn’t support it either. He has already addressed them as “You two” to get their attention…he wouldn’t need to throw a hein in. Listen to it again.

So we have symbols and numbers, just not words.

Rob McKeena had two hundred and thirty-one different types of rain entered in his little book, and he didn’t like any of them.

He shifted down another gear and the lorry heaved its revs up. It grumbled in a comfortable sort of way about all the Danish thermostatic radiator controls it was carrying.

Since he had left Denmark the previous afternoon, he had been through types 33 (light pricking drizzle which made the roads slippery), 39 ( heavy spotting), 47 to 51 (vertical light drizzle through to sharply slanting light to moderate drizzle freshening), 87 and 88 (two finely distinguished varieties of vertical torrential downpour), 100 (post-downpour squalling, cold), all the seastorm types between 192 and 213 at once, 123, 124, 126, 127 (mild and intermediate cold gusting, regular and syncopated cab-drumming), 11 (breezy droplets), and now his least favourite of all, 17.

Rain type 17 was a dirty blatter battering against his windscreen so hard that it didn’t make much odds whether he had his wipers on or off.

I hear a pretty clear /h/ at the onset of the word, which probably made me discard “eh” before I even though about it.

As the immortal Paulie Walnuts said in the last episode [of The Sporanos], when he sat down after a big meal at Bobby Bacala’s funeral and unzipped his pants to give his full belly some breathing room, “In the midst of death, we are in life, henh? Or is it the other way around?”

On the other hand, this is the same Doctor who decided to start saying allons-y because he liked the sound of it, so maybe hein isn’t so bad, eh?

You two — we’re at the end of the universe, eh! Right at the edge of knowledge itself, and you’re busy … blogging! Come on…