A budgie belonging to a share house has, after several years of near-total silence, settled on exactly one word, deployed at unpredictable intervals throughout the day, and no one in the house will admit to teaching it.
The word is "unacceptable," delivered in a flat, slightly clipped tone that several housemates have independently described as "eerily specific" and "not really budgie-shaped, as a phrase."
"It's not baby talk. It's not 'pretty bird.' It's 'unacceptable,'" said one housemate. "Someone in this house said that word enough times, with enough conviction, that a bird learned it. That's the part I can't get past."
Attempts to trace the word's origin have gone nowhere. A group chat inquiry, phrased as casually as possible, was met with three separate denials and one deflection about the bin roster. A whiteboard poll, put up "as a joke, mostly," returned no votes.
"I've got a guess," said another housemate, declining to elaborate. "I'm not saying it in this house."
The budgie, for its part, appears entirely unbothered by the scrutiny, offering the word at random — mid-breakfast, during a phone call, once, memorably, into a moment of total silence at 11pm — with no apparent trigger and no interest in expanding its vocabulary further.
"We've tried teaching it other things," the first housemate said. "It's not interested. It's got its word. That's the word."
The house has, in the absence of a confession, settled into an uneasy truce, treating the budgie's outbursts as a kind of ambient household commentary no one particularly wants to take personally.
"Every time it says it, everyone in the room just sort of looks around," the housemate added. "No one's ever looked guilty. Which somehow makes it worse."