Semantic Jellyfish

There is a thin semantic line separating weird and beautiful.

And that line is covered in jellyfish.

Welcome to Night Vale.

The podcast episode this somehow refers to is here, its Wikia page is here, and the project's home page is here.

I haven't listed to the Night Vale podcast. Perhaps I'll do that while I'm travelling to Washington. Still, my wife found the quote on Pinterest, and it's been eating at me. What does it mean?

And I don't mean, "How does this strange line fit into the Night Vale world?", no, I mean "What does that English construction actually say?" The more superficial question interests me here.

(Two friends of mine inspired this dig.)

Semantics: semaphore antics, when two Army signals specialists get bored.

Thus we see that the military is training jellyfish to assassinate writers in an attempt to control the global supply of--

**cough**

Pardon me. Now where was I? Ah yes...

Semantics: the study of meaning. (Thanks, Mirriam-Webster and Google.)

So what I get out of this quip is that the meanings of "weird" and "beautiful" are actually fairly close. I don't think I understood this until I saw this rendering, which made me realize that jellyfish really do play with that line. They are surreal and beautiful, especially when their colors are brought out like that. They are also utterly alien to me, a dry midwestern boy.

So I think that there is a line. It's thin, if it's not a proper probability field, and many things are in the same in-between-almost-both zone that jellyfish lie in.

There you go. That's what I think it means.

(With modern Art attempting to explore the distinction, I think the tentacles and neurotoxins could be brought in for an extended, painful analogy...)