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 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.
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. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an
eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city
and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
11. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
12. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
13. 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.
14. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.
15. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
16. 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.
17. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
18. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
19. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
20. 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 land mine or something.
21. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
22. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
