Metaphors Be With You

People link to this list of 27 funny metaphors all the time. But that’s been around for years, and no one has ever tried to expand it. The only other effort I’ve seen to collect good rhetorical language has been a handful of entries in the Adolph Eichmann’s Evil Cake Contest, which is also too old and too short – although I will forever remember it fondly for teaching me the phrase “nuclear Agamemnon”.

So here’s my list. Some are repeats from my old blog. Some are similes or other forms of figurative language. Some are a little vulgar. Some (most) I have lost the attribution for, but will credit if someone reminds me. All come with a serious trigger warning for groanworthiness.

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The night passed like a kidney stone: painfully and with the help of major sedatives.
— Little Lytton Contest

This raises more red flags than 1956 China
— kodiak_claw on Reddit

This day is moving slower than a snail moving backwards on a turtle moving forwards

When I saw those two girls kissing I was as hard as Chinese math.

You find your prodigal memory accesses have been stomping around the heap like the Incredible Hulk when asked to write an essay entitled “Smashing Considered Harmful”
— The Night Watch

It turned out that Obamacare, despite all the massive brainpower behind it, had some “glitches,” in the same sense that the universe has some “atoms.”
— Dave Barry

Justin Bieber is to music what Justin Bieber is to Marine Biology.
— GS Elevator Gossip

John M. Byrne is so tragic that breast cancer walks to end him.
— cracked.com

Healthy foods, like reality show stars, tend to be both high-maintenance and tasteless.
— cracked.com

Off he went, faster than a French border guard with track shoes and a coupon for cigarettes.
— Silfay Hraka

Men are like chocolate…they come in bars, head straight for your thighs, and can never last long enough to satisfy you.

Fake relic dealers in the Middle Ages created enough crowns of thorns, Holy Grails, and apostle-femurs to stock a macabre, New Testament-themed Wal-Mart.

As corny as Kansas in August
— South Pacific

I hate to call a guy fat, but he had more chins than a Taiwanese phone book.

His frenzied movements made him look like a lunatic trying to learn semaphore
— John Larkin

He uses statistics the way a drunk uses a lamppost – for support rather than illumination
— Andrew Lang

He had a Dickensian relationship to alcohol – exposure to spirits would completely change his personality

You are a girl with as much talent for disguise as a giraffe in dark glasses trying to get into a polar bears-only golf club.
— Blackadder

Dan Brown has a gift for metaphor and detail – a gift that’s defective and needs to be returned. I hope he has a receipt.

On reflection, all the mistakes I have made are, in some way or another, your fault. You’ve been at the helm, sowing chaos and stupidity through the landscape of my days like some sort of retarded Johnny Appleseed.
— www.goats.com

Work is like a dick. If it gets hard, fuck it.

I get hit more often than a blackjack player facing a deck of deuces.
— Order of the Stick

When you get right down to it, museums are basically zoos for inanimate objects.

Japan is to crazy as the Middle East is to oil

The plot is as engaging as watching a foot race between two convenience stores.
— cracked.com

It’s like you crystallized the best sex you’ve ever had with a woman and put it in a tiny bottle on your spice rack. No, wait, it’s like you took THAT spice and snorted it while screwing her hotter sister.
— OotS

Ayn Rand was the Evel Knievel of leaping to conclusions
— NYMag

Monopoly is to the contemporary board gamer as garlic-infused kryptonite snakes are to Super Vampire Indiana Jones.
— Lore Sjoberg

A good coffee must be hot as the kisses of a girl on the first day, sweet as her love on the third day, and as black as the swearing of her mother when she hears of it.
— Old Chinese proverb

Videogames and movies get along like cats made of oil and dogs made of water.
— Lore Sjoberg

I’ve got the strong feeling that [this movie], based on the talent involved, this is going to be a “loose adaptation,” in the same sense that the Holocaust was a loose adaptation of Nietzsche
— cracked.com

Rowling is as subtle as a large elephant with a big sign reading “I am subtle.”

This movie’s plot has more holes than the PGA championship
— TriggerStreet

He’s as bright as Alaska in wintertime.

The MPAA’s deals are shady as a 100-year old elm.
— Tech Industry News

The giant spider web was created by many spiders working together in harmony, like a United Nations without Russia.

Sitting on the dais, overlooking Washington’s elite, I felt like the Best Man at a wedding between the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore.
— Stephen Colbert

It sounded like the smell of raspberries tastes
— Terry Pratchett

There are a number of body parts [like the appendix] that may have served some important purpose in the distant past, but are now more likely to host disease and infection, much like pay phones.
— Lore Sjoberg

The Church of England is to religion what the cucumber sandwich is to food – it goes quite nicely with a cup of tea, but that’s about it.
— Pat Condell

Tom Cruise is so far in the closet he’s talking to Aslan.

We aren’t ranking the dumbest hip-hop lyrics ever. That would be like making a list of people Hitler was mean to.
— cracked.com

His head was as empty as a eunuch’s underpants.

I am such a hard-core atheist I make Richard Dawkins look like the Virgin Mary
— Bruno Maddox

This game is to free time what whales are to krill.
— Defective Yeti

If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame-retardant.
— Al Gore

I’m straighter than John Wayne voting for Reagan on a horse.
— Achewood

O God, who is as far beyond the universes I span as infinity is beyond six…
— The House Beyond Your Sky, Benjamin Rosenbaum

At last, I’ll be goin’ home, as sure as Thor don’t own shaving cream!
— Order Of The Stick

He has all the common sense of Medusa checking her makeup
— Order Of The Stick

Mother, more gravy. This turkey is as dry as Oscar Wilde
— Stewie, Family Guy

I have more muscles than a New England clambake.

The Assyrians were the first people to start using iron weapons instead of bronze which, to put into a modern perspective, is sort of like showing up for a knife fight with the Death Star.
— cracked.com

With a wet, tearing KERRRAAAAACTCH sound, Molly exploded like a meat piñata at a birthday party for very strong, invisible children.
— John Dies At The End

The debate club is one of Cork’s most venerable societies. We’re older than John McCain and cooler than Barack Obama. Joining is easier than Sarah Palin’s daughter and simpler than Sarah Palin’s son.
— Introductory speech at the Cork debate club

Most of her cooking ended out as the culinary equivalent of the Tunguska event
— Jasper Fforde

It’s like I’m drowning, and monkeys dressed as lifeguards are throwing me anvils
— Dilbert

As far as appropriate national slogans go, “The luck of the Irish” isn’t far behind “The easy and high paying jobs of the Mexicans.”
— cracked.com

The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying “And another thing…” twenty minutes after admitting he’s lost the argument.
— Douglas Adams

Jokes should be short and elegant, like a mathematical proof or a midget in a ballgown.
— Bottled City

On the David Wong Social Awkwardness Scale, with “1” being going to the “Pickup” instead of “Order” counter at a restaurant and “10” being a guy getting caught on national TV having sex with a dead baboon, I’d have to say that the following minutes alone with Amy rated about a 9.6.
— John Dies At The End

About the film’s merits I prefer to be silent at this stage, except to say that it seemed quite long, in the same sense that the Thirty Years War probably seemed quite long to anyone who had been expecting it to be over sooner.

I am more touched than a congressional page.
— Scott Adams

It’s the most blatant work of fiction since vows of fidelity were included in the French wedding service.
— Blackadder

He swings the bat…it’s a hit!…it’s going…going…and like America’s credibility on the world stage, it’s GONE!
— The Simpsons

Our marriage has been through more hardships than the Jews and Charlie Brown combined.
— The Simpsons

You’re making less sense than an epileptic auctioneer
— goats.com

Her art was about as deathless as a mayfly working on an oil rig.
— Ursula Vernon

I go through life like Helen Keller in a room full of Rubix Cubes
— Scott Adams

Someday, it will be one of those things we look back on with heartwarming nostalgia, like the Atari 2600 and polio.
— Defective Yeti

He asks how, if God is a person, He can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.
— Terry Eagleton

Like the ski resort of young girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for young girls, the situation was not quite so reciprocal as it appeared

His jokes were like oil, crude but precious.

Ambition is like a frog sitting on a Venus Flytrap. The flytrap can bite and bite, but it won’t bother the frog because it only has tiny little plant teeth. But some other stuff could happen, and it would be like ambition.
— Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts

The tension was as thick as a community college student
— goats.com

He was as guilty as a Catholic O.J. Simpson
— goats.com

I kept my cool like Steve McQueen’s corpse in an interstellar void
— goats.com

I will help, but the cost will be higher than a Volkswagen full of hippies on a mountaintop
— goats.com

Angrier than a mother bear whose cub has just been sold on Ebay.
— Questionable Content

As famous as the unknown soldier

He makes lichens seem dynamic

Bush interprets the constitution the same way a Unitarian interprets the Bible

The American media has the attention span of a caffeinated Irish Setter.
— Defective Yeti

She was not only homely, but it was one of those homes with a burnt out trailer in the front.
— Terry Pratchett

Instead they stand immobile on the escalator, like tourists at the Mount Olympus Zoo’s gorgon exhibit.
— Defective Yeti

Radon is an interesting element, because it is both noble and deadly, like Vlad the Impaler
— Lore Sjoberg

Many say that DOS is the dark side, but actually UNIX is more like the dark side: It’s less likely to find the one way to destroy your incredibly powerful machine, and more likely to make upper management choke.
— Lore Sjoberg

My indifference to that comment can only be described as sexual in intensity.
-– Martin Terman

It’s the most pointless book since How To Learn French was translated into French.
— Blackadder

I like computers. To me, computers are kind of like tangerines, in that I can’t think of a good analogy about either right now.
-– Scott Adams

It was more difficult to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegan’s Wake in a wind tunnel.
— Dennis Miller

Everyone at the party was as stoned as a United States embassy.
— Anonymous

Life is short and hard, like a body-building elf
— The Bloodhound Gang

A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there.
— Brent Wade

The building was a true skyscraper – thousands of tons of steel and more stories than a bar full of Vietnam veterans.

A telegraph system is like a giant cat, stretching across the country. You pull on the tail in New York, and the head squeals in Los Angeles. Radio works exactly the same way, except that there is no cat.
— Albert Einstein

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche (apocryphal)

Love is like pi – irrational and very important.
— Lisa Hoffman

I’m as happy a dingo in a nursery.
— St. Leo

[See also: puns]