Lies My Email Told Me

I received the following email, which claimed to be submissions from high school English teachers of metaphors and similes written by their students:

Every year, English teachers from across the USA can submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country. Here are last year's winners.


1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli, and he was room temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.


Now, I thought this was pretty amusing, but it seemed suspicious to me. Who are the high school students writing these sentences in actual English papers? Numbers 2, 3, 8, 11, 14, and 20 seemed particluarly unlikely to be written by kids in high school. Not that I think that high schoolers couldn't come up with some really vivid, funny, interesting metaphors and similes. These just didn't seem to be in the style of high school kids. So, I looked around the Internet to see if I could find an actual contest for English teachers to submit their kids ananlogies, and not only was there no such thing to be found, but all of these come word-for-word from a "bad analogy" contest by the Washington Post, some from 1995 and some from 1999. Which makes sense, more sense than the English teachers submission story, but why would someone have collected these and tried to pass them off as the work of students? Why not just send out an email saying, look at these great bad analogies from the Washington Post? What is the point?

And it's amazing how far and fast these chain emails spread. When I was looking for some information on an analogy submission contest for English teachers, I found a couple of blogs that had posted this exact same email and list, but without any mention of the Washington Post contest. It really makes me wonder where this particular email originated from. Anyone else seen it before? Anyway, this would make a great illustration to show students that you can't believe everything you read in cyber-space. And then you could have them come up with their own bad analogies, which actually are written by kids.