Little Blue Book #1354 is called Striking Similes, and I have done my readers the enormous favor of reading through this entire book(let) and culling from it my favorites, which I have categorized as the following:
Similes I just like and hope to use sometime soon:
Near as the bark to the tree
Close as the cu’s in cucumber
Dumb as a senator
Low as a snake’s belt buckle
Useless as whistling psalms to a dead horse
Rotten as the gills of an old mushroom
Miserable as a frost-bitten apple
Wild as a maniac’s dream
Crooked as a snake with colic
Sad as a subpoena
Thin as the girl who swallowed the pit of an olive and was rushed to the maternity hospital
Safe as a stone in a peach
Noisy as a living skeleton having a fit on a hardwood floor
Droll as Eliezer who wrote 300 volumes on sowing cucumbers
Yellow as the jaundice
Black as the inside of a fountain pen
Mouth like a venomous flower
Hair like an exploded can of tomato soup
Breasts like blind faces lifted in prayer
Apparent like a microbe’s eyebrow
Sore as a porcupine with ingrown quills
Sigh like the dying gasp of a siphon bottle
Race like an epileptic dervish
Yawn like a bored tiger
Stumble like a cat shod with walnuts
Similes I don’t quite get & would appreciate someone explaining to me:
Pure as a bishop’s bathroom
Sweet as the head of your cane
Merry as three beans in a blue bladder
Safe as a crow in a gutter
Dead as Chelsea
Obsolete as a Congress shoe
Courageous as the cocks of Tanagra
Dangerous as men milliners
Face like an open letter in a foreign tongue
Stand like Mumphazard who was hanged for saying nothing
Swoon like a couple of billiard balls about to kiss
Wheeze like a calliope with sore tonsils
Dated similes:
Cold as a hot water bottle in the morning
Busy as a one-eared telephone operator
Completely inappropriate/un-PC similes:
Naked as an Indian’s back
Gay as a Negro funeral
Right as the Church of England
Quiet as a woman the first day and a half after she is married
Silent as a Japanese
Calm as a Mandarin
Yellow as a Chinaman
Oriental as a rug
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1 comment:
let me be the first to thank you for delving into the book and filling our brain with useful similes. And no, I can't explain the ones you mention, except perhaps for the calliope one. A calliope is a very loud and (to my ear) rather unpleasant sounding muscial instrument. The sound is made by forcing steam (these days compressed air) into large whistles. So I guess someone with a wheeze like a calliope with sore tonsils would sound thoroughly horrible.
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