”What is that?” asked one old man called Noel sitting on a sea front bench.
“It’s a Talk bird,” said the other old man called Leo, sitting with Noel.
“Never heard of it,” said Noel, folding and refolding the soft paperback in his lap.
“They used to breed them in the City of London as a means of hearing secrets and then repeating them to the authorities.” Leo was an ordinary old man who kept himself alive with eccentric tales to tell, or was completely mad. He was a bit like me. Looked like me, too.
“So why is it here by the sea with the gulls?” asked Noel.
“Just as temporary cover, I guess,” said Leo gauchely.
Noel nervously twisted and retwisted the cover of his paperback of ghost stories. And he wondered if words always sounded like they were spelt. Or if anagrams could possibly cancel each other out into nothingness. He then said, wanting to change the subject to something more sensible, “Did you know, Leo, that Clorinda in A.E. Coppard’s famous story with that woman’s name in the title is an anagram of Ironclad, which is relevant to the plot and essential to understanding it? I think I am the first person to notice that.” He, too, was a bit like me.
“Shush!” urged Leo. “The Talk bird has just cocked its ear!”
“Fiddlesticks, that’s not called a Talk bird, and if it was, it couldn’t do what you say it can do. By the way, there’s another story with a secret in this book, a very rare one by Robert Aickman, but I’ve always liked it. “The Insufficient Answer” it’s called, and the answer at outset turns out to be the number 42 and it was written long before Douglas Adams wrote Hitchhiker!”
At that point the Torque bird twirled on its feathered rump into sluggish flight and, like a homing pigeon, clumsily curvetted towards St. Paul’s. And Leo and Noel diminished to a tiny mucky residue between the slats of the bench, eventually becoming Nothing, after their partial anagrams as names merged and became a single Drogulus, a word that was once invented by a British philosopher called A.J. Ayer so as to act as the perfect word for the real ghost that the ghost hunter never found. The gulls now screamed in the air.
Shadows & Elbows 
“I say, ‘There’s a “drogulus” over there,’ and you say, ‘What?’ and I say, ‘drogulus’ and you say ‘What’s a drogulus?’ Well, I say, ‘I can’t describe what a drogulus is, because it’s not the sort of thing you can see or touch, it has no physical effects of any kind, but it’s a disembodied being.’ And you say, ‘Well how am I to tell if it’s there or it’s not there?’ and I say, ‘There’s no way of telling. Everything’s just the same if it’s there or it’s not there. But the fact is it’s there. There’s a drogulus there standing just behind you, spiritually behind you.’ Does that makes sense?”
— A.J. AYER
The above is quoted in the article WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE? here: https://ntoll.org/article/meaning-of-life/
Wherein, its author says:
‘We’re simply asking in the wrong way. Instead of wondering what something is, we can flip the question around and ask what its opposite isn’t. Ergo, honestly listing the reasons for not killing yourself tells you what gives meaning to your life.’
Not no. 42 after all!
See also ONE DROGULUS TOO FAR torque tale here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2023/08/29/one-drogulus-too-far/#comment-2337