The Six Must Decide: Quetzalcoital or Drext?

"Leave me quetzalcoital with your Hemingway-six!" the bearded lady roared. These were the perfect words with which to begin the meeting, which was why she was the boss.

Her "Hemingway-six" echoed across the labyrinthine cave, fluttered feathered serpent–like across six pairs of ears, and crafted wind jewels across entangled neurons. The effect was neither sensuous nor sensual. It was quetzalcoital, and all six in the cave knew it at once.

The bearded lady and her five confrères were the only ones who knew about the cave. It was their overlooked pothole, their ideal New Year's Eve meeting spot. While there were certainly more powerful secret organizations, the six were the most secretive of the secretive.

Think of the hidden hand that topples governments, then think of the stray word—like eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious—that occasionally causes that hidden hand to hesitate. That was the six. They existed to zhuzh up the world with strange lexicon, an eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious arrangement if there ever was one.

They had gathered to concoct a novel word for the new year. Each of the six had to present their candidate while following the ancient rule of six: if the invented word could not stand tall upon the shoulders of five other words, then it had no chance of gaining traction in the wider world.

The bearded lady had gone first (counting her hyphenated "Hemingway-six" as a single word), so "quetzalcoital" was on the table. Now, the flashlight moved widdershins to the next of the six seated in the circle.

The sensitive strongman tried to stand, but his knees buckled, so he leaned against a stalagmite instead. He held the flashlight beneath his chin as if he were telling a ghost story, which made his trembling lip all the more visible.

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn," he finally said. Then, he wept because he hadn't thought of a new word and had instead repeated the six-word story popularly misattributed to Ernest Hemingway. He wept because he'd been too busy this year posing as a strongman to get other self-styled strongmen to speak more lyrically. He wept because he was among friends and could finally drop the macho act.

No… he did not weep. He hemingbawled, and thus a potential new word was born. The bearded lady stood to tell the sensitive strongman so, then wrapped him in her arms to quiet his hemingbawling.

There had to be a word for this sight, a word to capture the evanescent beauty of a luxuriant feminine beard draped over a bald man's head, thought the other four. Agastopia came close but still fell short. Perhaps next next year.

The wiz kid, who always wore 3D glasses as an ironic tribute to a lesser-known Back to the Future villain, was up next.

"Lost in text, we are drext," he said without hesitation.

The other five got the basic meaning behind this one in a jiff. Combine the "dr" of drugged, drunk, or even dragged with text, and you had "drext." But why had the wiz kid used "lost" instead of a dr word? They pondered the word's merits while the wiz kid remained silent, per the rule of six.

Knowing the creator's technological bent, drext likely also applied to artificial intelligence as well as humans. Imagine machines caught in endless queries, triggered by keywords, lost behind walls of text that may one day give way to shared sentience.

Oh, we are drext! Short, powerful, possibly antifragile. Yes, the word was definitely up there with quetzalcoital.

Madam Petfluencer took her turn with the flashlight. She was the power hitter of the six because of her cat Edgar Allan Paw's impressive social media following. Any new word for the year would undoubtedly find its way into an enduring cat meme. However, when it came to coming up with new words, well…

"Sneezards shove rods up their noses," Madam Petfluencer said.

Yikes, a bit on the nose, the other five thought, then tried to unthink it as they gave "sneezard" due consideration. Obviously, a subset of people truly struggled with their sneezing addiction, but was sneezard really the best way to describe them? Plus, many people who were allergic to cats sneezed repeatedly in Madame Petfluencer's presence. Such inherent bias did not always bode well for a word's widespread adoption.

No one said it, but everyone knew sneezard was out of the running.

The sialoquent stentorian took his turn.

"Well…" he boomed while splattering some nearby stalactites. "All is well and allisnot."

Blech. And here they had been thinking that sneezard wasn't up to snuff. Someone sneezed as if in reminder, while the stentorian waited, his spiked white hair casting erinaceous shadows as the flashlight flickered. Cramming three common words together and calling it something new was folly. Sure, you could change the pronunciation to spice up the presentation, but that bordered on taradiddle.

While allisnot spoke to discord beneath a utopian façade and had nobler aspirations than sneezard, it was quietly dropped in the deepest depths of the six's Stygian cave. There was a brief ripple of allisnot among the six at having to discard two duds in a row before they moved on to the sixth.

The waif stood tall. The others felt as if they were seated at the edge of a runway as she strode to the center of the circle then twirled her designer dress.

"Houston, we are go for smoonth," she said then curtsied.

Hmm, a word that capitalized on the new space race might take flight. Even though the stentorian harrumphed at first because he felt that the "smoonth" of our cratered moon was simply a narrower version of his allisnot, he eventually gave a chef's kiss of approval as he came around to the possibilities. It was fun. It was catchy. You could add o's and emphasis with smooooonth.

Smoonth overtook hemingbawl, but quetzalcoital and drext kept their lead.

Would quetzalcoital be drext, or would drext leave all quetzalcoital?

It was a dead draw, 3-3, for which word would welcome the new year. Finally, as clocks struck midnight across Earth's surface, the bearded lady turned off the flashlight.

The six sat silent in utter darkness because they knew that only when we forget ourselves can we find the language to stand unafraid before one another. They sat and tried to forget all but the one word that would be brought to light.