Mystery duck sound

Onomatopoeia is a harsh mistress. I want to explain this sound I heard the other day in class, and putting letters to it is difficult. It sounded like a “wank wank wank,” but with a short “a,” like in “apple.” I figured I’d try to spell it like “wanq” but that doesn’t solve the “short a” problem and invents a word with a “q” in it, which is always more difficult for your brain to process quickly.

Ultimately, I was just trying to make the sound a duck makes, but have always felt “Quack” wasn’t quite what fits. Just like cats don’t say “meow” as much as they say “mrrrow,” ducks really say more of a “waanq.” (That’s still not quite right.)

But either way, it sounded a lot like a duck in my class. And ducks usually do not take 400-level courses. Except perhaps for that “Mallard Fillmore;” he’s a witty reporter duck in the newspaper. Rude, political-commentating ducks aside, I wanted to know what a duck was doing in my class.

I looked under my chair. Under the chair of the person next to me. Under the tables that serve as desks in Olin. I was beginning to get dirty looks from my prof at this point, so I figured I might as well trot to the front of the class and look underneath the screen for the projector.

I couldn’t see a duck anywhere. So I figured I was making it up or the duck was invisible. I never make stuff up, so I deduced the duck was invisible. Or at least invisible to the human eye. Other invisible ducks would have to be able to see it, or the species would die out.

But at the same time, I had to wonder if this was just one of many mutated ducks! That ducks had hit that point in evolution where a lot of random, super-duckling powers emerge and they end up locked in an epic struggle that is a parallel for racism!

But this was a loud duck, for being invisible. It literally never stopped until the end of class, when the waanqing slowed down and stopped at the same moment the guy sitting next to me turned off his computer. I felt silly. There wasn’t an invisible duck. There was a super tiny duck in his computer that fed off of wireless communications, and it died when the computer shut off!