trump: *pulls out of the paris agreement, severely harming the current global efforts to combat global warming because he’s either too fucking stupid or too evil to see that it’s a big deal and also starts the process of wiping out net neutrality, an objectively horrible thing for everone that isn’t a massive telecom company executive and will cause untold levels of damage on our ability to communicate through the internet*
media:
trump: *makes a spelling mistake on twitter*
media:OMG have you heard of
COVFEFE??????????????????????????????
look i really hate to be that person who takes anything seriously on this hellsite but i’ve had it up to about here with the “trump is an evil mastermind distracting us from the real problems instead of an unstable, senile old man with a tenuous grip on reality” conspiracy theories so i’ve just gotta do it today
too tired already to get into the net neutrality issue too but the point is: if you’re getting all your news from twitter memes, of course you’ve heard more about covfefe than actual policy, but the root of the matter isn’t that journalists aren’t doing their jobs and reporting on the real issues, it’s that you’re getting all your news from twitter memes
We normally decide how to pronounce an unfamiliar word by drawing analogies with English words we already know. For example, we knew how to pronounce “-ly” from words like “slowly,” so it isn’t too hard to figure out how to pronounce “bigly.”
But sometimes this approach runs into problems. In this case, there just aren’t any common English words ending in -efe. A wild-card search on the very comprehensive dictionary aggregator OneLook yielded the following list of words: jefe, fefe, efe, hefe, okeefe, hogrefe, keefe, reprefe, tefe and kefe. Pretty obscurefe.
So we have to search further afield. Maybe we go for the Spanish word “jefe,” meaning “boss.” Maybe we look to a different vowel, as in “fife” or “cafe.” Maybe we look to other spellings of the /f/ sound at the end of a word, like “ff” as in “fluff,” “gaffe” and “coiffe.”
The problem is that none of these is a close analogue, making it unsurprising that several Twitter polls have found that people are strongly split. But it looks like the lack of -fefe endings won’t remain true for long. People have started smashing covfefe together with other words to refer to the covfefe meme. There now exists the “threadfefe” (a thread about covfefe), an “exorfefe” (an exorcist of the word covfefe), a “presifefe” (president) and the slogan “If u think you’re above covfefe you’re part of the probfefe.”
“Average politician makes three gaffs a day” factoid actually statistical error. Covfefe Trump, who lives in a tower and makes 10,000 gaffs a day is an outlier adn should not have been counted
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