Every year, English teachers from across the country submit their most amusing similes and metaphors gleaned from high school essays. I’m not sure if this is really true or simply an urban myth, but here are some of the “winners” from 2007. But even if some under-employed writer wearing only a tattered robe wrote them in an unheated basement, they’re still funny.
• He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse 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.
• She grew on him like she was a colony of E.Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
• She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
• Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
• John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
• 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.
• The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
• It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
• He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
What’s your most amusing simile or metaphor? Or the one you’re desperate to find a place for in your writing? Or finish this sentence … “BeckyLand is like …”
0 thoughts on “Amusing Similes and Metaphors”
Ah, this was a great list. I aspire someday to write so badly. (Maybe I already do?) I’ll have to think about some metaphors. I like metaphors.
I do have a fond (?) memory of a simile someone once used while talking to me. I was 16 or 17, and working at my first regular job. In a cookie shop. (Is that regular?) After I’d been there several months, which I guess was longer than most teens would stick around at a job, the owner said to me: “Your getting to be a fixture around here. Like some furniture.”
Now that I think about it, I wouldn’t consider most furniture to be fixtures. But I suppose I should be glad he didn’t liken me to the bathroom sink.
I wish I was that creative …
The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
… now that’s thinking outside of the box!!
I’m sorry, but the only thing that came to my mind was how badly one of my sons mangled similies when he was too young to understand them. I’m sure other parents have experienced this. In our family, the misunderstood phrases tend to stick around, and might still offend a bystander who just happened to overhear “Funny? Funny like MY CROTCH!”
Alejna … I’m sure it was a compliment. Nobody could do without their fixtures OR their furniture. You were obviously the lard holding their cookie shop together.
Lana … I’m sure you could be that creative if you tried. Maybe try a little ballet to loosen up. It would be like WD-40 for the soul. Or maybe lard.
And Claudia … oh, my my. If I had heard your son say that, I’d have tried to adopt him on the spot.