And the Other Is a Jellyfish

By Geoffrey Pullum. Last week the British prime minister, the right honorable David Cameron, was trying to enjoy a quiet holiday on Lanzarote, the easternmost island of the Islas Canarias, ignoring the lurking press photographers constantly seeking to document his leisure activities. Unfortunately he also ignored the advice of locals about sea swimming, and had a painful encounter with an organism of the subphylum Medusozoa.
Cameron is not very popular in Britain. The right wing sees him as vastly too liberal (he pushed through the legalization of gay marriage!), and the leftists see him as just another Eton-educated posh boy siding with the bankers against the people. On the social media, the chatter rapidly sided with the jellyfish. And for me as a linguist the interest lay in the rhetorical structure of the way they crafted their witty remarks and jokes. More...