Starlight Glimmer already knew what was going to come out of that darn orange stallion’s mouth, even before he said anything. Out of all the times Sunburst could’ve come over to see her new hometown, it had to have been that week. The week she decided to mess up again and cause havoc the like of which she’d never caused before.

Her only saving hope was the thought that maybe, just maybe, the trend had only affected Ponyville, and that therefore, her friend would respond in the usual manner. She’d always had lousy luck with life, but maybe this time, things would finally work out.

Please, Celestia, she prayed to herself, even though she knew full well that Celestia was only a goddess in the very loose sense of the word—the way ponies exaggeratedly used it to describe very tall, very beautiful mares. If you can hear me now—and even if you can’t, because I know you probably can’t—at least give me this. I’ve had to put up with this for three whole days now, and I’d really like it if you just got to the part where I learn some weird, contrived lesson. Please.

“Starlight!” Sunburst called out, finally spotting her in the streets.

She still couldn’t bring herself to make eye contact with him, instead choosing to stare at his blue star-print cloak. She’d always had a thing for blue star-print cloaks. It’d started with her fillyhood crush on Star Swirl the Bearded and intensified when Sunburst started wearing one. She still hadn’t had enough time to sort out whether or not Trixie was an exception to this rule, but twice was certainly enough to make her wonder.

Just then, Starlight heard the very phrase she dreaded most.

“It’s been so long! I really cocoed you!”

She sighed in exasperation, already knowing that calling the next few hours an annoyance would be an understatement.

After the ill-fated encounter with Sunburst, Starlight was back to her studies. She crouched over her book fearfully, hoping more than anything that Twilight wouldn’t be able to see that she wasn’t taking notes on her friendship lecture. Instead, her notebook was littered with a single word: “cocoa.”

At this point, she was so tired of the little saying that she barely even questioned it anymore. Everypony in Ponyville had started saying it all of a sudden, and at first she’d thought it was just some stupid fad somepony had forgotten to tell her about. Oh, how Starlight wished that was how this whole mess started. At least then, she could make everypony shut up about it.

But now, four days into Cocoagate, and she still hadn’t thought of anything about how to stop it. Answers weren’t coming, and all she could really do was watch everypony around her, trying to glean some meaning out of the nonsense word. Starlight would write down every single way ponies used it and examine it day after day. And there were oh, oh so many ways it could be used.

“Cocoa Glimmer!” she’d heard school-age foals yell as she went by. Variations included “Cocoa Cheerilee,” “Cocoa Rarity,” and so on and so on and so on. Nopony ever called stallions “cocoa,” which led Starlight to believe it was some sort of mare-exclusive title.

“Cocoing the train” was another usage of it that she’d heard. Ponies who appeared at the station on time or showed up early were never accused of “cocoing,” which led Starlight to believe that, as a verb, “cocoa” meant “to show up late.”

(Before she could celebrate too much about this discovery, however, she’d come across Rainbow Dash yelling, “Get a load of Starlight! That egghead just cocoed the train!")

And then, there was the way Sunburst had used it: “I really cocoed you.” Even though she’d already had some idea of how these three phrases fit together, that conversation had only further confirmed it.

Turning back to the first page of her journal, she stared at a single sentence, her only lead in the whole situation:

Cocoa=miss.

(The irony of her finally using the equal sign in its proper sense was not lost on her.)

Somehow or another, Starlight had discovered on the second day of the cocoa shenanigans, ponies had started saying “cocoa” whenever they would have normally said “miss” in any other situation. Miss Glimmer, for instance, to miss a train or another pony. And whenever she tried to correct them, they’d just look at her with strange glances as if she was the one who was wrong.

“I’ll have you know that I’ve studied Equestrian for years and years,” Starlight had told Rainbow Dash, “and no matter how you look at it, ‘cocoed’ isn’t a word.”

“I beg to differ,” Rainbow had said with a chuckle. “Maybe you just think that ‘cause you’ve lived under that rock village of yours for so long, but ‘cocoed’ has always been a word. And you just cocoed your train.”

“My village wasn’t under a rock, and I didn’t cocoa my train. I missed it, just like any other pony would say.”

“But why in Equestria should ‘missed’ be a word? It sounds pretty lame, if you ask me, and I bet you five bits that Twilight would freak if you said that to her face.”

While ‘cocoaspeak” was the most frequent manifestation of this strange phenomenon, Starlight had soon found that its opposite, “misspeak,” was every bit as common. It turned out that, in a society where every use of “miss” was somehow switched with “cocoa,” ponies needed something to do with all the times they would’ve used “cocoa” in the usual sense of the word, and that was where “miss” came in.

As far as Starlight could tell, Pinkie had become the misspeak queen. She’d first found out about it when she’d stopped by Sugarcube Corner during the first day of Cocoagate, when Pinkie had told her to pick up a bag of “miss beans.”

“Excuse me?” Starlight had asked with a raised eyebrow. “What the hay is that?”

“You know, silly, miss beans,” Pinkie had replied as if just repeating it would clarify everything. “You put ‘em in cake and cookies and muffins and candy and sometimes even spaghetti!”

“Do you…use them to make chocolate, by any chance?” she’d finally realized after a few minutes of confusion.

“Yep! You get lots of miss beans and make yummy, yummy chocolate! Everypony knows that! Are you feeling a bit loco in the miss today?”

“Why, yes,” Starlight had said through clenched teeth, adding one of her village smiles for good measure. “That must be it. I think I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today or something…”

“Okie dokie lokie!” Pinkie replied. “As long as you come back in an hour with those miss beans, it’ll all be water under the bridge!”

Starlight couldn’t quite bring herself to recall whether or not she’d ended up getting the cocoa beans, but in any case, everypony else she’d asked had called them by that same name. The more and more she realized it, the graver everything seemed to be getting.

What if, she thought that night as she scribbled in her notebook, I’m the only pony in all of Equestria who knew what those words used to mean?

There was only one pony she hadn’t heard them from yet. And, therefore, there was only one way to prove her theory.

“Um, Twilight?” she questioned, raising her hoof. “I was at Sugarcube Corner not too long ago and I was just wondering: what do they make chocolate out of?”

Twilight merely raised an eyebrow in response.

“And just what exactly does this have to do with Aristolneigh’s theories on friendship?”

“Nothing, actually.” She chuckled nervously and brought a hoof to her mane. “I just remembered that Rainbow Dash wanted me to ask you what chocolate was made out of. We…kinda made a bet about it, and the arguing got pretty ugly. You know, she swore it was made from miss beans, I swore it was cocoa beans, that sort of thing. Can you believe that? Miss beans, isn’t that just the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard?”

The silence was so quiet, she almost swore she could hear it. Then she realized how ridiculous that sentence was and figured her mind must really be fried from all the cocoing and missing going on.

“Starlight, that’s not ridiculous at all. Chocolate’s always been made from miss beans. Why would cocoa beans even exist?”

The unicorn’s eyes twitched slightly, even as she continued to smile.

“Because they do, all right?! What point is there in questioning it? Up until this week, everypony everywhere in Equestria used ‘miss’ and ‘cocoa’ the way any sane pony would. ‘Miss’ was for unmarried mares who didn’t like being called ‘Ms.’, and ‘cocoa’ was a drink. I don’t know what in Tartarus happened to switch everything around, but I have had just about enough of it, and here you’re telling me that even you of all ponies, the smartest pony in Ponyville, think I’m insane, too?”

Twilight, seeing her castlemate’s stressed situation, patted Starlight on her back and pressed herself against her.

“Oh, Starlight, I never said you were insane,” she explained. “It’s not your fault you think a word means something different than everypony else thinks it does. It’s all part of how the Equestrian language works—ponies never agree on what words mean for long.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Starlight questioned, not quite realizing how redundant the statement sounded in the context of Twilight’s discussion.

“It’s simple linguistics,” the princess continued. “Eventually, somepony’s going to wonder why words mean what they do, and why one word means something that they feel another word should convey. Our language is such a strange thing that sometimes, nothing about it makes any sense. For example, why do ponies drive their carts on parkways and park their carts on driveways?”

“Driveway? What the hay’s a driveway?”

Twilight placed her hoof in the air, about to explain, before realizing that driveways were something that only existed in the alternate human Equestria she visited from time to time, and therefore weren’t something that’d be easy to explain to her pupil.

“That’s not my point. Let me put it another way: once, there was a young colt who, for whatever reason, didn’t like the word ‘quill.’ He didn’t think ‘quill’ was the right combination of letters and sounds to represent the feather pens we use every day, so he called them ‘frindles’ instead.”

“But they’re quills,” Starlight protested. “Calling them frindles wouldn’t make any sense. That’s not even a word!”

“But, if enough ponies used it, ‘frindle’ could become a word. So that’s what he did: he got everypony in his magic school to use ‘frindle’ whenever they would normally use ‘quill,’ and eventually, that became the word for it. If you were to go to that school, they’d still use ‘frindle’ to this very day, but if you were to go to, say, the Crystal Empire, and say ‘frindle,’ they wouldn’t know what you were talking about. That, to them, would be enough reason to call you a madmare.”

With a satisfied sigh at another lecture well-made, Twilight made her way to the kitchen to make some miss.

“But that still doesn’t answer my big question,” Starlight complained as she followed her. “How did ponies start using ‘miss’ and ‘cocoa’ to mean ‘cocoa’ and ‘miss’ in only a week? Slang can’t just pop up out of the blue, and even if it could, you wouldn’t be using it. Whenever Rainbow Dash uses it, you just tell her that it ‘isn’t a real word.’”

After the miss dust had melted completely into the cup, Twilight picked it up with her magic and gestured for Starlight to follow her. The two found themselves in the princess’s library, which was even bigger than the one the treehouse had once held. Putting the miss down, Twilight effortlessly levitated a purple-and-gold book with her magic.

“Language spells,” she finally answered. “They always go and mess up everypony’s speech like crazy if you’re not careful with them. Don’t you just hate it when you don’t know what a spell does and you cast it, unaware of its potentially world-shaking consequences?”

“You…sound like you’re talking from experience,” Starlight said blankly.

“It’s nothing,” Twilight replied. “Just the story of how I got my wings. That’s one for another day. But for now, all you have to do is cast the counterspell on page 461, and everything should be back to normal by tomorrow.”

Starlight began to levitate the book without thinking, looking forward to a world where words meant what they were supposed to mean once more, when one last thing came into her mind.

“Twilight?”

“Yes?”

“If the solution was this easy, why did you go all out with that lecture?”

With a giggle, she gave a single response.

“Hey, I’ll take any chance I get to use that linguistics minor I got with my magic degree.”

The next day, the ponies’ speech was once more restored to normalcy, and Starlight had never been more relieved about anything. In hindsight, she wasn’t quite sure what had caused her to blow up so much over something so small, but now that everything was in its place, she could canter without worries.

Everything about this day had been an ordinary one, and all Starlight had to do now was wait for Rarity at the train station. Nopony had told her she had cocoed her train, and nothing else of significance had happened until Rarity returned with her guest.

“Oh!” Starlight shouted when she saw the cream-colored earth pony with her. “This must be the friend from Manehattan I’ve heard so much about!”

“It sure is,” Rarity replied. “She’s been a dear with the store operations. If it weren’t for her, that place would be a goner without me.”

The cream-and-blue earth pony gave a slight wave of her hoof before extending it to Starlight.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she whispered.

“You too, Coco Pommel!”

As soon as Starlight saw the other mare blush, she knew. It wasn’t really over. It never would be. Either it was all one big joke on Rarity’s part, or nothing had ever really worked to begin with.

Starlight could already feel herself falling to the ground, hooves above her face, mouth extended in an eternal groan, as Coco said the one thing she dreaded most.

“Gosh,” Coco chuckled, “there’s no need to be so formal!”

Author's Notes:

Three years spent towards an English degree, and this is what comes out of it...

(Also, "Cocoing" is now a thing to match "Moselying"!)