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. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag
filled with vegetable soup.
11. 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.
12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when
you fry them in hot grease.
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.
15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences
that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.
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.
19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
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 land mine 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.
