Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. 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 unearthy 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 PM 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 seperated 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 PM, travelling at 55MPH, the other from Topeka at 4:19 PM, 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, 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 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.