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.

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.

Comments: If most of these fractured bon mots seem too clever to have
been accidentally conceived by high school essayists, that's because they
weren't. They were entries in a long-running Washington Post contest
launched in 1993 called "The
Syle Invitational. "
Among other literary challenges, readers have been invited to compose intentionally
humorous similes and metaphors, often centered around particular themes. Most
of the examples above were published in 1995 and 1999.