With Parliament quickly collapsing into a completely inert shouting match, it's been a while since we've noticed anything untoward happening in America. However, amid the increasingly gloomy outlook for Donald Trump's presidency, he managed to pull off another one of his semi-regular linguistic triumphs.

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“Democrats can’t find a Smocking Gun tying the Trump campaign to Russia after James Comey’s testimony. No Smocking Gun...No Collusion.” @FoxNews That’s because there was NO COLLUSION. So now the Dems go to a simple private transaction, wrongly call it a campaign contribution,... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2018

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....which it was not (but even if it was, it is only a CIVIL CASE, like Obama’s - but it was done correctly by a lawyer and there would not even be a fine. Lawyer’s liability if he made a mistake, not me). Cohen just trying to get his sentence reduced. WITCH HUNT! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2018

Smocking, as the Merriam-Webster dictionary's Twitter account pointed out, is "a type of embroidery made of many small folds sewn into place", which isn't strictly within Mueller's remit.

Granted, there have been a few seismic rumblings underneath the White House in the last week - the evidence is clearer now than ever before that Trump directed Michael Cohen to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels, and more and more legal experts reckon that would be an impeachable offence if it were proven - and this is just a typo. But is it really just a typo? As we've mentioned, Trump plays the English language as if it were his first time on a tuba: it's mostly unlistenable, but he does parp out occasional moments of savant genius. Here are five of his best:



Covfefe

The big one. On 30 May last year, Trump tweeted: "Despite the constant negative press covfefe". That was it. It might have been a verb - despite the constant negative press, you just gotta covfefe your way through, baby - or possibly a codeword to activate sleeper cell agents. In the end, even Trump didn't know.

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Who can figure out the true meaning of "covfefe" ??? Enjoy! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2017

Bigly

The debate over whether he said 'bigly' or 'big league' is one of the great questions of the age. The question first came up during the first presidential debate in late September 2016. "I'm going to cut taxes bigly, and you're going to raise taxes bigly," Trump told Hillary Clinton. That wasn't the first time he appeared to say 'bigly' either. In May 2016, the Guardian reported Trump as saying he was "going to win bigly" while in June Trump was warning that Iran was taking over Iraq, and "taking it over bigly". On the other hand, Trump has tweeted the phrase 'big league' a lot, whereas 'bigly' is completely absent. Either way, Trump has absolutely no idea how to use the phrase 'big league'.

Nambia

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The President of the United States just made up an African country while speaking to African leaders pic.twitter.com/GBY56lYP5f — NowThis (@nowthisnews) September 20, 2017

"In Guinea and Nigeria, you fought a horrifying Ebola outbreak," Trump told African leaders at a lunch in New York in September 2017. "Nambia's health system is increasingly self-sufficient." It's possible Trump meant one or another of Gambia in West Africa or Zambia or Namibia in the south. Whichever one it was, it's at least an upgrade on "shithole".

Fake

"I think one of the greatest of all terms I’ve come up with is 'fake'," Trump told Trump ultra Mike Huckabee, father of his press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in what might loosely be termed an 'interview' in October 2017. "I guess other people have used it, perhaps, over the years, but I’ve never noticed it." Etymologists reckon 'fake' dates back to the late 18th century, but had you noticed it before then? No you hadn't. It was just waiting there to be dug up.

Priming the pump

"Have you heard that expression used before? Because I haven’t heard it," Trump asked the editor of the Economist during a May 2017 interview. "I mean, I just… I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good. It’s what you have to do." That Trump invented the phrase will come as news to the ghost of Franklin D Roosevelt, who used the phrase in a 1937 speech, and the assembled spirits of the New York Times' newsroom from 1933, which also used it. Economist John Maynard Keynes, who is most associated with the idea, will presumably be doing several hundred RPM in his grave at having failed to match Trump's eloquence in the description of his theory: "Yeah, what you have to do is you have to put something in before you can get something out." That's otherwise known as the Vending Machine Thesis.

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