A late-night investigation into why a group of teenagers could be heard laughing like sozzled hyenas downstairs while the rest of us tried to get to sleep revealed the cause as this list of 56 hilarious similes, purportedly from US high school students.
Down below in the comments, the miserabilists – who regard it as a sad indictment of educational standards – are joined by others who see in it a testament to the linguistic ingenuity of the youth of today ...
Responses were just as varied on Twitter, with @john_self remarking that it reminded him of "a (good) simile by Patrick McGrath, writing of passionate lovers: 'She was all over him like a frog on a branch'."
Passionate as a frog on a branch? This surprising citation from McGrath's 2004 novel Port Mungo – and the fact that John felt obliged to spell out that he was intending it as an example of a "good" simile – set me thinking. What is it that makes the difference between good and bad similes?
Terry Eagleton addressed much the same issue in How to Read a Poem, when he considered TS Eliot's "evening … spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherised upon a table", from J Alfred Prufrock.
How, the reader wonders, can the evening look like an anaesthetised body? Yet the point surely lies as much in the force of this bizarre image as in its meaning. We are in a modern world in which settled correspondences or traditional affinities between things have broken down. In the arbitrary flux of modern experience, the whole idea of representation – of one thing predictably standing for another – has been plunged into crisis; and this strikingly dislocated image, one which more or less ushers in 'modern' poetry with a rebellious flourish, is a symptom of this bleak condition.
What would Professor Eagleton make of simile 56: "The sunset displayed rich, spectacular hues like a .jpeg file at 10 percent cyan, 10 percent magenta, 60 percent yellow and 10 percent black"?
Whether a jpeg filled with yellow at those specific percentages can really be called "rich" as well as "spectacular" is a moot point, but the comparison of a natural wonder to a digitally generated colour certainly generates a striking sense of dislocation. Perhaps the technical details of a virtual palette speak more powerfully to a younger generation than McGrath's frog on a branch.
But to continue this cutting-edge literary research, what we really need is some more examples of the best and worst similes you've encountered. Just remember to tell me which is which ...
