What is a key bump? Merriam-Webster explains after Cawthorn interview.
Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) said in a recent podcast interview that he had been invited to an orgy by an unnamed colleague and witnessed other prominent Washington figures doing “a key bump of cocaine right in front” of him.
It was clear members of Cawthorn’s party were not thrilled by his remarks. On Wednesday, Cawthorn earned himself a talking-to by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and a public rebuke: “There’s no evidence to this,” McCarthy told reporters, according to Axios.
Less clear: the definition of “key bump.”
As it has so often done in recent years, Merriam-Webster’s Twitter account provided clarity. “People are talking about ‘key bumps,’ ” it wrote in a Wednesday tweet, “and so we have a duty to tell you some things about this.”
The “bump” in “key bump,” the dictionary explained, can be defined as “a small quantity of an illicit drug when inhaled in powdered form at one time.” Thus, an English speaker can “refer to ‘small amounts of drugs sniffed off a key’ as ‘key bumps,’ ” Merriam-Webster noted.
People are talking about ‘key bumps,’ and so we have a duty to tell you some things about this.
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) March 30, 2022The tweet, which had more than 42,000 likes and retweets as of Thursday morning, explained what Cawthorn claimed he saw. But McCarthy told reporters the freshman Republican “did not tell the truth.”
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Cawthorn did not respond to messages from The Washington Post on Wednesday or early Thursday.
Merriam-Webster’s “key bump” tweet was the second time this week that the dictionary waded into the political discourse. On Tuesday, it addressed the term “burner phone” after The Post and CBS News reported there was a gap of seven hours and 37 minutes in President Donald Trump’s phone logs during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The House committee investigating the insurrection is now looking into whether Trump used burner phones that day, according to the report.
Trump, in response, claimed he had “no idea what a burner phone is.”
But Merriam-Webster again had an answer, tweeting out an article Tuesday explaining that “burner,” in that context, “refers to something disposable, or that cannot be traced.”
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The dictionary’s Twitter account earned a reputation for trolling members of the Trump administration. When Trump’s senior counselor Kellyanne Conway used the phrase “alternative facts” to describe false claims about Trump’s inauguration crowd size, the dictionary tweeted: “In contemporary use, fact is understood to refer to something with actual existence.”
Share this articleShareMerriam-Webster was also quick to respond when Trump misused or misspelled words, including “covfefe.” Kory Stamper, a former lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, told The Post in 2017 that people were turning to dictionaries to make sense of current events.
“You’re seeing a lot more engagement online with dictionaries. That’s very unusual — it’s not the SAT vocabulary words they’re looking up. They’re really tracking with the news in a really granular way,” Stamper said.
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Merriam-Webster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cawthorn made the claims about his congressional colleagues last week on the podcast “Warrior Poet Society” after being asked whether life in Washington was at all like the Netflix series “House of Cards.”
Attempting to illustrate what he described as the “sexual perversion that goes on in Washington,” Cawthorn said he had been invited to an orgy by a colleague.
He also mentioned drug use, saying he watched some of the very people trying to curb Americans’ addictions “do a key bump of cocaine.”
Politico reported that Cawthorn met with McCarthy and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) on Wednesday morning.
“I just told him he’s lost my trust. He’s going to have to earn it back,” McCarthy said about Cawthorn, according to Politico. “I mean, he’s got a lot of members very upset.”
In the meeting, McCarthy said Cawthorn admitted some of his claims in the podcast were “exaggerated,” Axios reported.
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“In the interview, he claims he watched people do cocaine. Then when he comes in he tells me, he says he thinks he saw maybe a staffer in a parking garage from 100 yards away,” McCarthy said.
On Wednesday, neither “key” nor “bump” was named the dictionary’s word of the day. After all, the dictionary wrote, the phrase “has not yet demonstrated wide currency of use.”
Instead, the honors went to a more established word.
“Chagrin.”
Felicia Sonmez contributed to this report.
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