In the days of LPs,
when “Groovy” was a word used to describe a wonderful feeling, as in “The 59th
Street Bridge Song”, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were singing about a rare
kind of comfort: “Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down.”
Similes use the
helpers like or as to help create word pictures. Metaphors
dispense with the helpers.
Both similes and
metaphors relate a noun (a person, place, thing or idea) to something it cannot
be: She was a delicate flower.
Similes and
metaphors infuse our language with richness and power.
In Denise
McCluggage’s The Centered Skier,
a skier receives this metaphor from an instructor: “The mountain is a dish of
vanilla ice cream and you are hot fudge — flow down the slope.”
The mountain isn’t
a dish of vanilla ice cream, and the skier isn’t hot fudge, but what a vivid
picture this creates of a skier flowing down a mountainside the way hot fudge
flows down a mountain of vanilla ice cream.
Similes and
metaphors help us to see things in ways we never would before.
And, they link the
psychological with the physical. In Jonathan Safran Foer’s Incredibly Loud
& Incredibly Close, a
boy describes his sadness by saying he has “heavy boots” and his happiness by
saying that something makes him feel like “one hundred dollars”.
Children think in
metaphors. Do you recall staring at clouds and seeing animals?
Perhaps you still
do.
Have you ever
described yourself using similes?
I was as dizzy
as a kid on a tilt-a-whirl, as weak as twice-brewed tea, as low as a garden
worm, as timid as an escaped balloon and as unlikely to succeed as a mime
without hands.
Try your own: I
was as dizzy as _____, as weak as _____, as low as _____, as timid as _____ and
as unlikely to succeed as _____.
Now, dispense with
the helpers and describe yourself with metaphors.
I was a
bobble-head dog, a wrung-out tea bag, a hidden talent — a butterfly without
wings.
Similes and
metaphors make impossible, if not unlikely, connections with the ordinary
things.
Try listing your
qualities and then writing similes or metaphors about each one.
If you could be an
animal — any animal — what would you be? And why? That should get you thinking
metaphorically.
Now, imagine being
an object and describe yourself that way.
Try using uncommon
word pictures to describe your emotions.
My heart was a
rollercoaster.
It was as though
someone had turned out the light in my soul.
My dreams
swirled up the chimney and vanished in the night.
Our senses, as well
as our bodies, can be described metaphorically. In school, children are taught
that their bodies are “magnificent machines”.
Try this sometime: observe something ordinary, then connect it to something out of the ordinary.
Check out similes
and metaphors at www.copyblogger.com and at www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/figures-metaphor.htm.