Metaphorically Speaking

Every year, English teachers from across the country compile and submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphor found in high school students essays. Here below for your guffawing pleasure is a list of the top 25.

They better as you go on.

No doubt I came up with equally unintentionally hysterical verbiage in my time. Those poor kids were probably so earnest thinking they were crafting the greatest thing since Hemingway. I can actually feel the intensity behind some of these efforts. That did not stop me from laughing into a wheezing state as I read them. And on some of them, the tongue-in-cheek, smart ass attitude comes through loud and clear. These are crazy awesome funny.

Poor fools. They keep on the windy side of care.

My favorites? Three, six, eight, fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, nineteen is priceless, twenty-two is awesome, twenty-four came straight from the Cohen brothers oeuvre, I'm sure.

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 wisdom that only comes 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.

What are your favorites? Any you've heard yourself that you'd like to share?