Donald Trump said in the past that he created a “new word” and that he’s now calling it the “best word,” only to find out that the word has been in use for hundreds of years.
While giving a speech at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s conference in Washington, D.C., the former president Trump was proud of his linguistic skill. “The other day I was coining a word and I thought it is a great word: ‘braggadocious’,” Trump told the audience. “Is that not a great word?” Later he even introduced it to be the “best word,” obviously not knowing about it being used for a long time.
But at the same time, Merriam-Webster was telling Trump’s claim of fact-check status that “braggadocious” (the idea of being boastful or arrogant) was at least in the mid-1800s. The term itself is a culmination of “braggadocio,” which was first used by the 16th-century poet Edmund Spenser in his book The Faerie Queene.
They lost no time laughing at Trump’s statement, Twitter users flooded the network with memes mimicking Trump and his newly-coined word. They even posted on-record sources and cross-referenced history to show that Trump’s point was unfounded. Others went a step further to joke that Trump would likewise claim credit for concepts well known to everyone.
Trump’s claims regarding language are far from being a rarity. In 2017, he stubbornly claimed that he had “come up with” the phrase “priming the pump” though it had been a common and everyday term in the economics field for a long time.
It turns out that the whole matter has sparked a lot of fun and doubt among internet users once again, and Trump’s critics took the chance to make fun of the president’s habit of thus overstating his originality in whether he is carrying out policies, conducting business, or even using vocabulary.
