A Practical Joke

The boisterous surrounding crowd fell silent as the small spacecraft descended, a silver disk so stereotypical it was almost laughable falling gently from an overcast sky.

It touched down lightly as a soap bubble, the silence stretching thin but holding fast until a small hatch in the craft's underside slid open to an accompanying jubilant roar.

Aliens! It was true, they were real, we were not alone and Company had arrived!

A stout, oddly adorable rounded alien creature waddled solemnly out of the hatch, blinking four large luminous eyes in the Earth's brightly lit atmosphere. It surveyed the crowd minutely. The crowd rumbled slowly back into silence. An interminable few moments passed.

"Keeneetaa?" said the alien at last, a plaintive note jangling in its otherwise dulcet tone.

Silence. Everyone wondered, what did that mean?

The alien's eyes were distant and sad. After a while it slowly shook its head. Without another sound it turned and waddled, crestfallen, back up to the hatch, which engulfed it and then folded up neatly and closed itself tight. The spacecraft flew away.

Humanity was left mystified. Keeneetaa? Every scientist on earth bent their minds to study. What was keeneetaa? Speculation ran amok. Theories abounded. Every academic journal and every university course and every political conversation began to revolve around the question of keeneetaa.

A few years later the alien returned to the scene of its initial appearace.

Sniggering a bit, it whispered to its two alien friends, "Watch this!"

"What?" asked one friend while the other asked excitedly, "Did they fall for it?"

"Just watch," the first alien told them, and opened the hatch.

It waddled out once more, this time to a sea of humans all shouting together, "Keeneetaa! Keeneetaa!"

The two alien friends turned to one another, laughing. "Oh my stars, they did fall for it!"

"That's mean," one alien friend finally gasped. "You're corrupting their culture."

"They'll be fine."

"Keeneetaa!" cried the other alien friend hysterically, still laughing.

Keeneetaa is an obscene Ferblornian slang word that translates roughly to "Genitalia."