It’s the sort you invoke when, say, struggling partisans fixate on the one poll that suggests their candidate isn’t tanking — that’s cope. When those of us with W-2 income say the ultrawealthy are all miserable anyway, that’s cope. When some late-1950s Americans nitpicked the reporting on Sputnik because they couldn’t believe the Soviet Union launched a satellite first — that, according to the writer Jeet Heer, was “a pathetic display of cope.”