Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left York at 6:36 p.m. travelling at 55mph, the other from Peterborough at 4:19 p.m.at a speed of 35mph.The plan was simple, like my brother Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.
This list of howlers is prefaced with the note, “These are (allegedly) metaphors from actual GCSE essays.” A lot of the items on the list are not metaphors but similies (only the latter of which uses “like” or “as”). But they’re still funny. In the right context, many of these would actually be very good.
One of them, however, is a faded derivative of Douglas Adams’s descripton of the hovering Vogon spaceships: “The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.”Similar:
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my flows more tighter then the strape on your sneakers, Your soft because you can’t get loud like a cheap sneaker your mad because your girl does’nt no how to act my friends will run a train on here like a subway map. See i try to use metaphors to rap if you can use metaphors goo you can rap good
Ooops, sorry, Philipp. I was metaphorically not paying attention to what I was writing.
Who’s Ron? :)
Or is that another metaphor…
Heh. That’s an interesting one, Ron.
Just found this one;
“Silicon Valley was Mecca, and hundreds of thousands of Americas has suddenly become Muslim.” (http://www.zeromillion.com/econ/dot-com-crash.html)
I wonder if that’s good use :)
Mike, I feel like a slacker for not Googling to find the real source before I posted… thanks!
They’re most definitely not “from actual GCSE essays”: they’re from the Washington Post’s weekly “Style Invitational” contest several years ago, where readers were asked to submit the worst metaphors they could invent. The fact that Schoolzone would spin them as student error really bothers me, with the immense contempt towards students that such a spin suggests.