Covfefe is the word on everyone’s lips. Or rather, it would be if people knew how to say it. You see, this latest contender for 2017’s “word of the year” (see also: kakistocracy; emolument; kompromat) started life on the page. A page that was refreshed millions of times as Twitter users blinked at their screens in confusion. The president of the United States had once again typoed his way into the early hours and the world’s befuddled consciousness. This time, however, unlike “unpresidented” and “honered”, the mangling was so complete it wasn’t immediately clear what he meant.

Trump’s tweet went thus: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”, and that was it. Keyboard detectives have pointed out that the strokes needed to type “erage” are vaguely similar to “fefe”, and that would fit semantically with the rest of the brainfart. So, boringly enough, he meant to type “coverage”. But it was too late. Covfefe was born.

What is covfefe? Donald Trump baffles with late night Twitter post Read more

And with it, the new discipline of Covfefe studies.

The website Fusion polled its readers as to the pronunciation: they were given the choice of Cov-FEE-fee, Cov-FEH-fay and COV-feef, with the first quickly taking the lead (in my head it’s more like Co-VEH-Feh). Linguist Gretchen McCulloch noted that existing words give us very little guidance, and that the sequence of the voiced phoneme /v/ and unvoiced /f/ make for some tricky articulatory acrobatics. She also points out that “fefe” has already been “liberated” as an ending along the lines of -licious and -cation. People are talking about “threadfefes”, apparently, although the lack of a clear meaning makes the suffix harder to apply than, say, -gate. (McCulloch’s thread is very entertaining and worth reading in full).

Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) Accidental gaps: no words in English end in *fefe (compare "fife") and all "vf" sequences are acronyms https://t.co/8MK0Tzaosq

Trump subsequently deleted the tweet, but – here’s a shock – he seems to be loving the attention. At 6.09am EST he wrote “Who can figure out the true meaning of “covfefe” ??? Enjoy!”

Enjoy doesn’t seems quite right: it’s not exactly reassuring to know that the man with the nuclear codes can’t execute a tweet accurately. But we’re on this ride so we might as well get what entertainment we can from it.

In linguistic terms, covfefe-gate (I know) raises several interesting questions. It’s not yet clear what kind of life awaits the coinage in the wider language: perhaps it will remain tied to this moment, a famous one-off. It might, as McCulloch suggests, give rise to a productive suffix. Or it could become a meaningful word in its own right, with a sense akin to “snafu”. What is clear is that it’s not going to simply vanish. Trump is just too big(ly) for that.

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Who can figure out the true meaning of "covfefe" ??? Enjoy!

All of which gets me thinking about the influence of significant (let’s not say “great”) individuals on language. Iberian Spanish makes use of the sound “th” in many places where Latin American speakers just have “s” – for example, the middle consonant in the word gracias. There’s a story that this came about because the King of Spain had a lisp, which all his courtiers had to copy to avoid embarrassing him. Unfortunately, it’s a myth: “th” occurs only in specific positions, whereas in others “s” survives – not the situation you’d expect if imitation of a complete inability to pronounce “s” was the source.

There are, however, lots of real examples of invented words that survive and flourish – often to the point where it seems bizarre to think they were ever one person’s idea. Paul Dickson collected many in his book Authorisms: they include John Milton’s roughly 630 contributions to the English language, such as love-lorn, satanic, didactic, liturgical and pandemonium. Shakespeare’s plays apparently introduced the words bedazzle, fashionable, vulnerable and outbreak. There’s an obvious point to be made here, particularly with Shakespeare: plays have to be comprehensible to audiences, so it’s possible some of the words were current at the time they were performed, and The Bard merely gave us their first recorded uses. We’re on firmer ground with more recent examples: chortle was first used in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Cyberspace didn’t exist before William Gibson’s 1982 short story Burning Chrome.

In a slightly different vein, mistakes made by so many people that they become the standard form are very numerous. One is “to curry favour” – of which the Oxford Dictionaries has a wonderful explanation involving petting a mythical horse. But I haven’t been able to unearth any common words which trace their origins to a mistake by a single person. If you know different, tell me in the thread below.

And what now for covfefe? Like it or not, Donald Trump has created a word. Whether it will spread its wings beyond self-reference is a different question. One way of looking at the development of language is by analogy with natural selection. If a word is “fit” enough it will multiply and colonise all sort of environments. I reckon covfefe, though the spawn of an alpha male, is somewhat hobbled by its narrowness of appeal, and won’t amount to much. Then again, a year ago, I would have said the same thing about Trump.