Metaphors be with you!

Clever Manitoban poet Dennis Cooley calls a metaphor "a Greek taxi". I like that.

This is another old chestnut that lives on the interweb. Not only do students love this but they also come out of the exercise with a pretty good understanding of the difference between a metaphor and a simile. By taking some time to go through these you can introduce the concepts of a metaphors' tenor and vehicle and have the students identify them for each example. Each student could then make up their own.

Ok, here's a list that I use (like I typed above, there are variations of this all over the net).

• Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
• His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a tumble dryer.
• The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
• McMurphy fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a paper bag filled with vegetable soup.
• Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
• Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the centre.
• Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
• He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
• The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
• Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left York at 6:36 p.m. travelling at 55 mph, the other from Peterborough at 4:19p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
• The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the full stop after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.
• John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
• The thunder was ominous sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
• The red brick wall was the colour of a brick-red crayon.
• 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.
• Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
• The plan was simple, like my mate Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
• The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for while.
• "Oh, Jason, take me!" she panted, her breasts heaving like a student on 31p-a-pint night.
• 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 landmine or something.
• Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter."
• She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
• The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a lamppost.
• 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 cashpoint.
• The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium.
• It was a working class tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with their power tools.
• He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a dustcart reversing.
• She was as easy as the Daily Star crossword.
• She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature British beef.
• She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
• Her voice had that tense, grating quality, like a first-generation thermal paper fax machine that needed a band tightened.
• It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

Taken from student essays and found at

http://www.jardmail.co.uk/misc/studentessays.shtml