It's a Yiddish word ...  A few people have asked me about President's Trump's tweet in which he used the word "covfefe." Most people think he meant to write "coverage" and they have had quite a bit of fun with it, but actually it is a real word of Yiddish origin, meaning "a futile search" or "a pointless and false quest." It was originally transliterated from the Hebrew as "kabfefe," whose etymology is "kab"—relating to the mystical Qabalah—and "fefe," which is a word for "butterfly." What Trump was actually saying in Yiddish tweet-speak was, "We are doing great things despite the press's negative and pointless search, aka fake news."