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Saturday, June 25, 2016

Brexit Leavers can push Humpty Dumpty off the wall, but can they put all the pieces back together again?

In the previous two satirical posts (Goal, goal goal and Euro 2016 players) I equated the Brexit referendum result to a football own goal.

Now that British PM David Cameron has announced his resignation, it is clear that the Leavers will have to form a new government, negotiate the actual break with the EU, and make good on their myriad miraculous promises. Such as that the £350 million pounds the UK supposedly transferred net per week to Brussels would now be a windfall ready to be redeployed as a domestic welfare bounty.

But already, prominent Leavers are backpedaling, like UKIP's Nigel Farage, who now claims he never said this sum would be available for investment in the National Health Service, according to yesterday's
Independent.

Thus a more fitting metaphor for the next stage of the Brexit process is the English nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.



Alice's repartee with Humpty Dumpty from Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" seems even more appropriate to characterize the semantic confusion around the Brexit debate:
    "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' " Alice said.
    Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!' "
    "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected.
    "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
    "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
    "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
    Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. "They've a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they're the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"
posted from Bloggeroid

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