Jellyfish thinking

The word jelly, when applied to things like jellyfish, is so misleading as to... well, as to mislead one.

(Thanks for the picture Bruce. Hope you don't mind that I came across it while swimming through the bloggosphere, paralyzed it, brought it home and am ingesting it here.)

The word "fish" is also misleading in this instance. Combine the two misleading terms and you get jellyfish. That's how they are made.

Jellyfish belong to a group of animals called Cnidaria, a Greek word meaning "Yecchhhh!", pronounced "jell-eee-fisssshhhh." One of our favorites in Hawaii is the Portuguese Man O' War. Within two weeks of arriving in Hawaii in 1988 I had my fourth grade class at Kailua Beach for a day's outing, and I got nailed by a man o' war right across the backside. That was one very sore bum, I can tell you. My students, painfully polite, bit the insides of their cheeks and looked at me with big, sparkling, tear-filled eyes. Not one of them laughed until they thought I was well out of hearing range.

I appreciated it.

Jellyfish have a digestive cavity in which the entrance and the egress are same. (There's food for some serious thought.) This simultaneously in and out passageway cannot be claimed for jelly- like jello - which is why I am disputing the use of "jelly" to describe these little bastards.

The Cnidaria I am considering have poisonous tentacles, another feature lacking in jello. And gonads and things called "oral arms." Oh, yes, I'm not making this up, and you won't find those in your average bowl of jello, at least not unless you really strike it rich on Saturday night. Take photographs.

Some jellyfish are more than 100 feet long, to the envy of jello everywhere. Some can kill a grown man in minutes, which your unadulterated jello won't do.

And I can testify to that fact that jellyfish don't even taste like jello. I tried them once at a Chinese restaurant. Do you know, they fry them? Who on earth figured that out? "Ling Ho, I have a jellyfish here. What do you think we should do with it?"

What was Ling Ho thinking?

"Let's fry it." (!!) Jesus.

Jelly has always meant jelly, since the word was invented. Whatever they are, jellyfish aren't jelly fish. Let us refer to them, from this blog forward, as "Oral-armed little bastards."