The new geography of X is not Y

A post by Tyler Durden over at Zero Hedge (h/t el DG) attempts to chart the phenomenon:

For your definitive documented “X is not Y” atlasing needs.

1. “Spain is not Greece.”
Elena Salgado, Spanish Finance minister, Feb. 2010

2. “Portugal is not Greece.”
The Economist, 22nd April 2010.

3. “Ireland is not in ‘Greek Territory.’”
Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan.

4. “Greece is not Ireland.”
George Papaconstantinou, Greek Finance minister, 8th November, 2010.

5. “Spain is neither Ireland nor Portugal.”
Elena Salgado, Spanish Finance minister, 16 November 2010.

6. “Neither Spain nor Portugal is Ireland.”
Angel Gurria, Secretary-general OECD, 18th November, 2010.

7. “Spain is not Uganda”
Rajoy to Guindos… Last weekend!

8. “Italy is not Spain”
Ed Parker, Fitch MD, 12 June 201

Missing: “Uganda is not Spain” – they’ve got 3% growth – and surely more. If you search for “[NP0] is not [NP0]” at the British National Corpus at Brigham Young, one of the more pleasing results is “Bonn is not Weimar”. No “Berlin is not Bonn”, though, and the sailor on Columbus’s first voyage who said “Cuba is not China” has disappeared from the record over at BY’s Corpus del Español (part-of-speech code = [NP]).

[Turns out this has been around for a while.]

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