MORE SMILES FOR A SAD WORLD…
Courtesy of David Fenton, one of the funniest and most creative people I know, this set of metaphors reminded me of some of the “stretches” students made in the papers I’ve read in the past forty years of teaching university history courses…..
[Some of these are quite funny; the authors will probably end up in marketing somewhere.]
Every year, English teachers from across the country
can submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors
found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the
amusement of teachers across the country. Here are last year’s winners…..
1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had
its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and
breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience,
like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar
eclips e without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes
around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking
at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli,
and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that
sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had
disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock,
like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond
exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like
a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed
lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two
freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the
other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two
hummingbirds who had also never met.
17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob
informant, and she was the East River.
18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a
steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil.
But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you
get from not eating for a while.
22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical
lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe
from stepping on a landmine or something.
23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and
extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing
kids around with power tools.
25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought
he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
If you have some of your own similes and metaphors that need a truck to carry them to the dumps, feel free to add your comment. Merci, and have a smile or two tonight.