Covfefe

By now you might be aware of Donald Trump’s latest addition to the English language: covfefe. If you haven’t heard yet, at 12:06am Washington time last night, the President of the United States tweeted:

Despite the negative press covfefe

…and that was it! Obviously he was deliberately tantalising us with this new word he’d coined, throwing it out into the world and waiting for us to figure out its meaning based on subtle clues he’s left, while he slept soundly. Here are some of my ideas:

  • It’s a new type of coffee brewed specifically for him. Not that he’s misspelled coffee mind you, because the President of the United States wouldn’t tweet an unfinished message with an obvious typo late at night. No, this coffee is so special it gets to be spell covfefe. It’s a pity he doesn’t like it, but he shouldn’t be drinking covfefe at that hour of the night.
  • It’s a subtle reference to a mystery he’s solved in the new series of Twin Peaks that no-one has been able to figure out yet, because he’s so smart, because he’s the President of the United States. Keep an eye out for a tweet about “damn good cherrveve pie” soon.
  • It’s a secret code to Vladimir Putin to remind him about their Friends marathon on Friday: Calling On Vlad – Friends Event Friday Evening
  • We’re supposed to write down all the nonsense words he uses like bigly and covfefe, and at the end of his term, put them together to form an offensive anagram.
  • It’s the name of a character in the next Star Wars film, provided to him by Disney after he insisted he know something about the film no-one else does. They told him not to tell anyone, so this was his subtle way of revealing his knowledge to the world.
  • He meant to write coverage, but fell asleep before he noticed the error (and sent a clearly unfinished tweet), or had his phone taken off him by an aide as he spends far too much time tweeting.

Obviously I put those last ones at the end because they’re so unbelievable that they clearly couldn’t have been what happened. This is the President of the United States after all! We should all be grateful to him for his bigly contributions to the English language, as he leads his country to covfefe, covfefe together to greatness!

18 thoughts on “Covfefe

  1. I like it! I’m adding that to my vocabulary. I was searching just the other day for an exclamation more impressive than the overused “awful!”, something like Charlie Brown’s “oh, rats!” Now I have it. “What a covfefe!” Maybe borrowed from the French “brouhaha”?

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    • I think as long as one doesn’t get too preoccupied with the eccentricities of our leaders, they can be interesting for an odd brief laugh. And I think in our globalised word it’s good to know what’s going on in other countries. Even though I’m neither American nor British, I’m still interested in thr politics of both, as decisions made there can still affect me and billions of others.

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  2. […] Of course we could still use different words or phrases, but think about how much harder it would be to remember all that, especially if we did that for every case in English in which we use the same word or phrase with multiple meanings. Our vocabulary would quickly become much too unwieldy. Instead it’s much easier to use the same phrase for different contexts which share the same basic meaning. And that’s how language works anyway: whenever a new situation crops up that we need to label, we look around to see if there are any pre-existing words or phrases that will do the job. Fake news. Hashtag. Omnishambles. They’re all just repackaging old words and prefixes to meet the demand of new situations. So used are we to reusing language that when a daring visionary comes up with an entirely new word, it astounds us. […]

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  3. […] I really hope it goes ahead, for the prospect of peaceful relations and denuclearisation, obviously, but also just for a chance to know what they actually say to each other. Will they call each other Little Rocket Man and Dotard? Will Trump say bigly, and will Kim understand it? Will covfefe!? […]

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