Grammar: Similes 7

In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell warned against using a metaphor or simile you'd heard before.

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow... An accumulation of stale phrases choke him like tealeaves blocking a sink... Phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. (George Orwell, Politics and the English Language)

Justin Bieber’s house looks like a New Labour-era college campus built on PFI money. (@J_Bloodworth. “Suburban office park”, adds Adam Nathaniel Furman.)


The Brexit Party is starting to look like:
A bad pantomime
The Star Wars cantina
A Petri dish culture

With the arrival of Ann Widdecombe the Brexit Party candidates increasingly resemble the staff of a nightmarish Dickensian boarding school. (@thewritertype)

Negotiating Brexit has proven to be like trying to ride a bicycle up a sand dune. (@samsandercock)
The UK Brexit plan “could fall apart at first tap like a chocolate orange”. (Sir Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, 2017)

[Of a musical saw] It’s like a ghost singing. (youtube)

Knuckles lifted a fistful of crisps to his mouth and a sound emerged like an army marching through a field of dead bracken. (John Mortimer)

Number 3, Lauriston Gardens... looked out with three tiers of vacant melancholy windows, which were blank and dreary, save that here and there a "To Let" card had developed like a cataract upon the bleared panes. (Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet)

Mah Jong – a cross between gin rummy and Lego. (JL)

Me, just now, to the cat: "Come out, I know you're under there. I can hear you snuffling and grunting like a werewolf in a cheap horror movie." (MO'B)

Wales: like driving across a jigsaw puzzle box cover. (TJ)

You look like you drove through a thrift shop in an open car. (Or “ran through Christina Aguillera’s wardrobe covered in glue”.)

Like being trapped in a "drizzly, dark-grey, lukewarm sandwich". (Andrew Marr on the weather)

Today in 1066 King Edward the Confessor died without an heir. What followed makes Game of Thrones look like a game of musical chairs. (Dan Snow)

More here, and links to the rest.