NationStates Jolt Archive


idioms, analogies, similes, and metaphors.

Smunkeeville
28-06-2007, 01:11
assignment NSG!

I want you to make up a useless idiom, and awkward analogy, a shameless simile, and a really bad metaphor.

use of alliteration gets extra credit.

go forth and create!

also, what idioms do you find yourself using constantly? (if any)
Zarakon
28-06-2007, 01:18
assignment NSG!

Fish sticks aren't so bad, but I don't like fish in general.

Do I get extra points for the use of a non sequitor?

I want you to make up a useless idiom,

Huh, guess that dude flinged the apple.

Meaning: To use the word "flaucinaucinihilipilification" in an otherwise reasonable conversation.

and awkward analogy,

The majority is like Teller...Silent.

a shameless simile,

Ronald Reagan is the cool autumn breeze.

and a really bad metaphor.

Rocks are like rocks.

You did say really bad.


also, what idioms do you find yourself using constantly? (if any)

Kick the bucket. I use that one a lot.
Ifreann
28-06-2007, 01:21
Ronald Reagan is the cool autumn breeze.
Similes use like or as.


Rocks are like rocks.
Metaphors don't.

Grammar Man, away!
Swilatia
28-06-2007, 01:23
it's not like english language doesn't have enough of them. However, a really bad metaphor is "cats are good people". Wait, some-one used that before, didn't they?
Zarakon
28-06-2007, 01:23
Similes use like or as.



Metaphors don't.

Grammar Man, away!

Sorry, I always get those two confused.

I don't really see why we need to different terms for two things that are almost exactly the same...
Swilatia
28-06-2007, 01:26
I don't really see why we need to different terms for two things that are almost exactly the same...

Welcome to English Language.

Wait... we have a lot of that in Polish as well! Doh!
Kinda Sensible people
28-06-2007, 01:26
I want you to make up a useless idiom, and awkward analogy, a shameless simile, and a really bad metaphor.


Useless idiom: To clean the Court (meaning to arrive too late to something important for all the wrong reasons)

Awkward Analogy: Amp is to Agitation as Arc is to Amphibians

Shameless Simile: As sexy as a stripper? (Shameless enough for you?)

really bad metaphor: The frog was the final flippant failure in his faire of frights. He fled.
Ifreann
28-06-2007, 01:27
Sorry, I always get those two confused.

I don't really see why we need to different terms for two things that are almost exactly the same...

If the English language made sense then lackadaisical would refer to a shortage of flowers.
Curious Inquiry
28-06-2007, 01:52
assignment NSG!

I want you to make up a useless idiom,
"Hasta dinero," see you when you have money. Except that might be useful.
How about "Vaya con queso," go with cheese?
and awkward analogy,
It's kind of like dancing like a fish on a bicycle.
a shameless simile,
:fluffle:
and a really bad metaphor.
I'm a little unclear; what is a meta for?
use of alliteration gets extra credit.
Un uh, unable to uhssist.
Swilatia
28-06-2007, 01:57
:fluffle:
similie, not smilie. :)
Darknovae
28-06-2007, 02:01
I want you to make up a useless idiom, and awkward analogy, a shameless simile, and a really bad metaphor.


Idiom: Talk about lighting a cigarette with a forest fire.
Analogy: Kissing girls is like eating porridge (got it out of fanfiction, it's not really mine)
Simile: I'm as angry as the :mad: smiley.
Bad metaphor: hmmm.... i'm rather lacking in creativity at the moment. :( I'll come back later.
Hamberry
28-06-2007, 02:08
Damn, he just pulled a Chamberlain.
Definition: Gave away something to a bully, especially something that wasn't theirs to give, just to appease him.

Censors are the bedroom curtains of TV: Blocking out what we really want to see.

Joysticks are like politicans: they never do what they say they're going to do.

Trees are really big sticks.
AB Again
28-06-2007, 02:13
Idiom:
Out of the little house :- meaning something unusual/irregular. (Translated from Portuguese - yes it really exists)

Analogy
Computers are like minds

Similie
As useful as a pork butcher at a bar mitzvah

Metaphor
A gazelle of a Sumo Wrestler
The Blaatschapen
28-06-2007, 02:20
Idiom: He puts the flowers outside. (it's dutch and it means that he's going to party).

Simile: Women are like drugs, damn addictive.

Metaphor: War is Slavery; Strength is Freedom; Peace is Ignorance

Do I get bonus points for that last one? :D

PS. I hope I did this right... English is not my native tongue after all :(
Swilatia
28-06-2007, 02:23
Metaphor
A gazelle of a Sumo Wrestler
That's not a metaphor. There's more to it then not making sense. You also need to use "is" or "are", but not "like" or "as".
Demented Hamsters
28-06-2007, 02:23
These aren't mine but I think you'll enjoy them:

The sun rose over the horizon like a great big radioactive baby's head with a bad sunburn, but then again it might just have been that Lisa was always cranky this early in the morning.

Jane was toast, and not the light buttery kind, nay, she was the kind that's been charred and blackened in the bottom of the toaster and has to be thrown a away because no matter how much of the burnt part you scrape off with a knife, there's always more blackened toast beneath, the kind that not even starving birds in winter will eat, that kind of toast.

The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from 'I Can't Believe It's Not Butter'.

As Fiona slowly drew the heavy velvet curtain aside, her eyes smoldered black, deep, and dark as inside the lungs of a coal miner, although it would be black in anyone's lungs if you could get in there because there wouldn't be any light, even in the pink ones of people who don't smoke.

Losing is like fertilizer: it stinks for a while, then you get used to it.

A branch fell from the tree like a trunk falling off an elephant.

He was as bald as one of the Three Stooges, either Curly or Larry, you know, the one who goes "woo woo woo".

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 p.m. instead of 7:30.

Her pants fit her like a glove, well, maybe more like a mitten, actually.

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 center.

Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

He was as tall as a six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch tree.

Just like (or as) a bicycle rider lifts his butt from the seat when he sees a bump coming, so Bob pulled back, emotionally, when Alice got angry.

She danced with the grace and elegance of a pregnant cow.

The painting was very Escher-like, as if Escher had painted an exact copy of an Escher painting.

The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

After sending in my entries for the Style Invitational, I feel relieved yet apprehensive, like a little boy who has just wet his bed.

Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like "Second Tall Man."

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.

The moon looked like a discarded toenail clipping submersed in a puddle of saliva on a black formica countertop.

She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.

The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.

We are all like those little pink and blue plastic people in the game of Life.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

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.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

He felt like he was being hunted down like a dog, in a place that hunts dogs, I suppose.

The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon.

She was sending me more mixed signals than a dyslexic third-base coach.

She felt used and unwanted, like the two chocolate halves of an Oreo cookie after someone has already licked the cream out of them.

My underwear stuck to my backside like an All-Pro cornerback to a rookie wide receiver as I browsed through the seed catalog that had mistakenly found its way into my mailbox.

Chicken: it's like a cow, but different.

The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object.

His fountain pen was so expensive it looked as if someone had grabbed the pope, turned him upside down and started writing with the tip of his big pointy hat.

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 dryer without Cling Free.

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.

She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge to a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

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.

Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

"Oh, Jason, take me!"; she panted, her breasts heaving like a college freshman on $1-a-beer 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 land mine or something.

The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill. ) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.

The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword.

Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

Her voice had that tense, grating quality, like a 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
Snafturi
28-06-2007, 03:36
Men are like pots very functional and an important part of of most people's lives, yet under appreciated and often forgotten about.
Okay, that was crappy, but for some reason I thought I saw pots in the pole options. I thought I'd try to run with it.
IL Ruffino
28-06-2007, 04:01
Throbbing like an English Bulldog.
Paris is to France, as freedom is to Paris.
As big as a roll of quarters.
Life is like diarrhea, you never know what's going to shoot out at you.

I don't know, and you all suck.
Thumbless Pete Crabbe
28-06-2007, 04:19
it's not like english language doesn't have enough of them. However, a really bad metaphor is "cats are good people". Wait, some-one used that before, didn't they?

That's not a metaphor, as much as just strange usage. Also, I like it when someone describes a single person as "good people." Dunno why, but it cracks me up. :p

"Hey, do you know Sam, from downstairs?"

"Who, Sam Mitchell? Yeah, he's good people." :p

An old friend of mine did that a good deal.
Gartref
28-06-2007, 05:00
A fun simile from one of my favorite Kids in the Hall skits....

"I think that moon is a bit of a spy. Yes I do. There was a moon like that on the summer of my sixteenth year. Some say I was sixteen but [sigh] I don't know. And there was a girl, too; her name was Marie. At night together we would walk down by the sea and oh my god if you could see the body on this woman. The way at night her long legs would stick into the moist night sand like god's own barge poles, you know. And I longed to tell her the feeling I had in my heart for her but the words would not come, they would not come through my spotty adolescent face, they would not come through my angry hair or my sweaty feet or any other part on this body that I now call a man. So the words je t'aime were never passed between us but the moon, yes, that moon spied on us."
Gartref
28-06-2007, 05:33
I do have a shameless simile, that has the added bonus of being completely nonsensical and useless.

If while driving, I see someone speeding excessively, I say:

"That guy's racing like a piss-horse!"
Intangelon
28-06-2007, 07:01
I want you to make up a useless idiom,

There's more than one way to pluck a passenger pigeon. (They're extinct...)

An awkward analogy,

Last time I saw a face like that, it had seven German anuses pointing at it.

A shameless simile,

Life is like a penis: when it's soft, you can't beat it, and when it's hard, you get screwed. (Gotta love Vonnegut.)

And a really bad metaphor.

She was referring to Ronald, the stoplight of her life.

Also, what idioms do you find yourself using constantly? (if any)

I have always been partial to the folksy ramblings of Foghorn Leghorn:

"Sharp as a bowling ball."

But I also like:

"Subtle as a flying mallet" and "dumb as a box of hammers."

Others include:

"Shit fire and save matches!" ("Come now, be reasonable.")

and

"Fuck me running." ("Oh dear, not again.")