So. Um. Apparently Trump’s Infamous Typo... is a Real Word
Cov fe’fe is Arabic for “I will stand up”.
His original tweet, which the press immediately went nuts over, was “Despite the negative press covfefe”... which looks at first blush like he typoed “coverage”, gave up and went to bed, having posted gibberish.
But “despite the negative press I will stand up” not only makes perfect grammatical sense, it’s also on-target with his anti-press message. It jibes with his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, and explains why the White House insisted earlier today - to the mocking laughter of the press in general - that it wasn’t a typo in the first place.
Trump even made what seemed a self-disparaging followup tweet before Spicer’s conference, saying
Who can figure out the true meaning of "covfefe" ??? Enjoy!
Nor does this revelation about the word’s meaning come from Trump or anyone in the Administration - I myself saw it in passing while surfing my Twitter feed. Bored, I plugged the proper version into Google Translate. All Trump had done to prevent an easier search was remove the space and apostrophe - like spelling “you ain’t” as “youaint”.
Even his own fans didn’t immediately catch on to what should have been fairly obvious. But his fans aren’t the press, and it’s the job of that press to do at least a little due-diligence - just a scraping of effort in terms of research - which they just don’t seem to be interested in doing.
Much easier to cobble up a meme, mocking a typo, except in this case there is no typo. It’s a real word. So... is this the Internet’s first true metameme?
