Smell the Covfefe

If you woke up midweek to a rather interesting — albeit alien — word trending on social networking websites, you weren’t alone. ‘Covfefe’ was the talk of not just the town, but the whole world, after US President Donald Trump accidentally used the word, purportedly a typographical error, in a tweet on early Wednesday.

“Despite the negative press covfefe,” wrote Trump, possibly hoping to type ‘coverage’, in a late night tweet. Given the President’s inane ability to whip a storm with his older tweets and new, covfefe has became popularly searched term over the past couple of days.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary, whose social media executives have regularly taking digs at Trump’s Twitter faux pas (remember ‘unpresidented’?) too decided to call it a day, after realising the surge in search for the particular word was thanks to Trump’s tweet.

Even his rival Hillary Clinton decided to take a potshot at him after he tweeted about her the next day. “People in covfefe houses shouldn’t throw covfefe,” she wrote in response to his tweet. And quite like the rest of the world, the Indian Twitteratti were quick to jump onto the bandwagon and take a dig at the US President’s latest gaffe.

“I love the way the covfefe crumbles,” wrote Twitter user Febin, while most others decided to make sure the jokes fit desi memes. As a picture of Trump uttering ‘covfefe’ was posted, a middle-aged man, famous for his exasperated looks in old Indian advertisements turned up in the same meme to say ‘Arre bhai kena kya chahte ho?’

Irrfan Khan, who recently lent himself to several memes with comedy collective All India Bakchod, saw himself being turned into a covfefe joke too, in his Drake avatar.

Understandably, comparisons between Trump’s blunder and Shashi Tharoor’s infuriated tweet that spoke about “exasperating farragos” were drawn pretty quickly by the social media savvy Indians. Pranav Sapra wrote, “[Politically correct english classes] Shashi Tharoor: Repeat after me, farrago Trump: Covfefe (sic)” and Rohan Kalia tweeted, “Even Shashi Tharoor started wondering and looking into dictionary after hearing the word #covfefe #covfefemeans (sic)”