A Thinking Man

Apologies for my absence.  I’ve been pre-occupied over the ‘holidays’ with a couple of other writing tasks that I needed to complete.  Having finished them today I found myself with a few idle hours before returning to work tomorrow and started amusing myself with dreadful similes to tweet.

For those of us who have forgotten, a simile is a figure of speech comparing two unlike things, often introduced with the word “like” or “as”. Even though similes and metaphors are both forms of comparison, similes allow the two ideas to remain distinct in spite of their similarities, whereas metaphors compare two things without using “like” or “as”.

Famous examples of similes in poetry would include:

Burns: My love is like a red, red rose …

Eliot: Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out across the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table …

Similes have two particular associations for me.  First, similes remind me of a my early career as an English teacher.  In the late 70’s when I started my teaching career in a Boys Secondary Modern School, I often tried to get the students to use similes in order to develop their imagination and creative writing skills.  In those days, before comprehensive education, students were divided into two piles at the age of 11, and those who failed to get to the elite Grammar Schools, ended up in Secondary Moderns.  It was challenging enough teaching poetry in a boys school, but especially in double English on a Friday afternoon in a Secondary Modern with 30, 13 year olds.

One Friday afternoon I had been working with the ‘bottom set’ of 13 year olds - all great characters, but all teenage lads who had significant difficulty in reading and writing.  Although many could talk the hind leg off a donkey, when it came to the written code, most had a reading age of less than 10 years, and could barely write a paragraph without making many, many discouraging mistakes. Yet, it was this group that gave me one of my most memorable experiences of my teaching career.  Because the group were struggling with anything developed, I encouraged them to jot down short comparisons using similes, using as many as they wanted to. And from  this unlikely stable, Anthony Drake produced one that moved me at the time, and still produces a slight tingle to this day:

The darkness was like an undertaker’s carriage, going to a grave …

The second association of similes for me is humour.  Comedians often use them to great comic effect - you know, “My mother-in-law was like …”.

My job appraisal was like sitting through an hour of root canal treatment!

He was tapping furiously, like  a two-fingered man trying to return a text message.

She was like a frustrated mosquito in a mannequin factory.

I enjoy Twitter for all sorts of reasons, but if I am not too careful, I find myself tweeting just factual stuff that I find interesting or important, or just bland details of my life.  Today, I consciously tried to inject something different, by creating a few similes.  They were tortuous and strained, but were an attempt to bring some humour to the end of the holiday season.

Below are the ones I have come up with so far.  What similes can you create that might bring a smile to others?

Christmas is like a box of chocolates. You can’t ignore it. You have too much too quickly, and feel slightly bad about it.  But it eventually comes to an end.

A good relationship is like a Cormish pasty - mysterious substance wrapped around some harder lumps, and a dependably strong crust.

Sex is like brushing your teeth - a little squeeze on the bottom, then energetic bursts of movement, followed by a faint tingle, a brief flash, and finally a smile.

Tags: Burns, comparisons, competition, creative writing, Eliot, figure of speech, Humor, Humour, ipadio, metaphor, phlog, poetry, Secondary Moderns, simile, teaching, tweeting, tweets, Twitter