Poland’s foreign minister has become the subject of online derision after he said he had met the representative of a non-existent country as part of Poland’s campaign to get a non-permanent seat on the UN security council.

Witold Waszczykowski was in New York to lobby for a seat on the council from 2018-19. On Tuesday, he told reporters he had held meetings with officials from nearly 20 countries, including some Caribbean nations “for the first time in the history of our diplomacy”. He then gave examples of countries “such as Belize or San Escobar”. The latter, as many people were quick to point out, does not exist.

A spokeswoman for the Polish foreign ministry said it had been a slip of the tongue and Waszczykowski was thinking of Saint Kitts and Nevis, a two-island Caribbean country known in Spanish as San Crisóbal y Nieves.

#SanEscobar State Council introduces a visa-free regime with Poland, and a visa requirement for @SealandGov citizens, starting Jan 15th. — San Escobar (@rpdsanescobar) January 10, 2017

But the statement did not prevent social media users from jumping on the gaffe. Using #SanEscobar, Twitter users made jokes and even invented a flag for San Escobar.

A Facebook page adorned with maps and photographs of the imaginary country was set up, including pictures purportedly of work on a huge statue of Waszczykowski being built to honour his contribution to bilateral relations between the two countries.

One account, called San Escobar, has been tweeting policies and landscape photos of the non-existent nation for the past day. Another posted a picture of a San Escobaran banknote featuring a picture of Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of Poland’s governing party.

Waszczykowski’s error brought to mind the 1933 Marx Brothers film Duck Soup, in which the tiny nation of Freedonia, “Land of the Brave, and Free”, suffers from severe financial problems and receives a loan from a wealthy widower to stay afloat.

The term Freedonia has since been used to refer to fictional countries in popular culture. While working on Candid Camera, Woody Allen played a practical joke by asking passersby what they thought of the bid for independence for Freedonia.

In the 90s, satirical magazine Spy got several members of the US Congress to issue statements condemning ethnic cleansing in Freedonia, and in season six of political drama The West Wing, the character CJ Cregg wonders why Freedonia is left off a list of candidates for Nato membership.

In reality, it is not unusual for politicians to stumble by making up names of places or inventing words. George W Bush was so adept at this that the term Bushism was devised to describe unconventional statements, pronunciations, malapropisms and linguistic errors in his speeches.

Little-known fact: bilateral meetings in #SanEscobar regularly go on for 48 and sometimes even 72 hours straight pic.twitter.com/upSKuXzSkt — Exen 🇵🇱 (@Exen) January 10, 2017

Some claimed that during the televised debates with Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump had made up words such as braggadocious, but Merriam-Webster dictionary explained that it is “a dialectical word from 19th-century America” used to mean “the annoying or exaggerated talk of someone who is trying to sound very proud or brave”.

The word is so seldom used in the 21st century that it does not have an entry in the dictionary, Merriam-Webster added.