[Editors] analogies/metaphors from high-school essays

[Elizabeth Thomson]

Who knows if these actually *did* appear in high-school essays, but 
they're funny nonetheless!

Elizabeth
News Office

>
>  > Actual Analogies and Metaphors Found in High School Essays
>>  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.
>>  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 35mph.
>>  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, Grandpappy 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. "Oh, Jason, take me!"; she panted, her breasts heaving like a
>>  college freshman on $1-a-beer night.
>>  23. 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.
>>  24. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender
>leg
>>  behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
>>  25. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around
>with
>>  power tools.
>>  26. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells,
>as
>>  if she were a garbage truck backing up.
>>  27. She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword.
>>  28. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in
>>  any pH cleanser.
>>  29. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
>>  30. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it
>>  to the wall.
>> 
>> 
>>
>>


-- 

====================================
Elizabeth A. Thomson
Assistant Director, Science & Engineering News
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
News Office, Room 11-400
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307
617-258-5402 (ph); 617-258-8762 (fax)
<thomson at mit.edu>

<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/www>
====================================