“A simile is just a metaphor with the scaffolding still up”*…

Russell Samora has been fooling around with figures of speech; with his colleagues at The Pudding, he’s fielded a fascinating analysis of of that comparative workhorse, the simile…

Similes are all around us. But, if you haven’t considered this figure of speech since grade school, here’s a refresher: similes compare a shared quality of two things, often using “like” or “as.”

I pulled every simile in the form “as ___ as ___” from tens of thousands of fiction books for the top 500 most common adjectives… I thought it would be a trivial exercise, but the more I poked around, the more questions I had…

Samora explains how similes are structured and how they are used (and with what relative frequency) in literature. He examines some of the most common– and several special cases (“The Ironic Ones”). And he explains his methodology and sources… all in the context of a lovely interactive data visualization.

It’s as cool as hell: “Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise,” from @pudding.cool.

* James Geary

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As we agree with Steve Martin that “a day without sunshine is like, you know, night,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1789 that Richard Kirwan published his essay in support of the phlogiston theory (the belief, that dates to alchemical times, in the existence of a fire-like element (dubbed “phlogiston”) contained within combustible bodies and released during burning. Kirwan was among the last of its advocates.

A well-regarded scientist in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Kirwan met and corresponded with Black, Lavoisier, Priestley, and Cavendish. Indeed, while scientific history remembers him as a defender of an incorrect theory, his work probably spurred Priestley and Lavoisier, who respectively discovered and named the actual elemental agent of combustion, oxygen.

But Kirwan is also remembered for a personal eccentricity (one of many) that led to some referring to him (all too poignantly) as “crazy as a bed bug”: he hated bugs (especially flies). Kirwan paid his servants a bounty for each one they killed.

source

"Hell is one of the most versatile nouns in the dataset. However, most of them have nothing to do with hell itself."

Russell Samora and Shelly Tan for The Pudding: https://pudding.cool/2026/05/similes/

#Longreads #Language #Words #Simile #FigureOfSpeech #Communication #Literature #Fiction

Today's poem:
- from Morocco

Darija:

“كل كلمة منك بحال نسمة فالبحر،
كتسري فقلبي و تخليني نحلم بلا حدود.”

Translation:

“Every word from you is like a breeze over the sea—
it flows through my heart and makes me dream without limits.”

#poetry #love #sea #breeze #simile

The Oyster

The Oyster is a harmless soul who lives beneath the changing tides.

Keeping to itself it takes no sides, feeding quietly where its secret hides.

But no longer, for we say that some are ‘blessed’,

When a speck of grit fouls its silvery nest.

Our Earth is as the Oyster’s life, for commercial gain has plundered its wealth,

And we take it with greed, much more than we need, at the expense of its finite health.

And like the caged hen, whose last stolen egg ascertains it will soon be plucked,

The oyster is attacked by a feverish hand as we comically say it is ‘shucked’.

Yet, another word often springs to mind, which careless people use,

Sometimes to joke or curse or randomly say . . . and sometimes to hurl abuse.

But I will save it for our future world, which now shares a common fate.

For “The world is my oyster” as they say and yet we consume both at an extravagant rate.

Reading by Digital AMY:

(from my poetry book: “Frames of Poetry” – available Amazon, Kindle, Google Books)

The #BreakUp - She dropped him like a Hot Fudge Sundae in August.
A Heartbreak #Simile

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pboco3tJNuw

“The full moon filtered through the fabric of the tent like boiling coffee through a sock.”

#RobertoBolaño

#literaryquote #quote #simile

Today I feel…

As unmotivated as this attempt at a simile.

#lowEffort #motivation #simile

The tentative sound

Shyness is the tentative sound of the orchestra tuning up before the symphony begins. It is a beautiful, fractured piece of music in itself. It is the orchestra attempting to find its shared intent and is over all too quickly if you ask me.

*hunh*

That’s a really striking simile. (That’s a simile, right?) This goes on the pile of things I wish I’d written.

ɕ