Definition:
A figure of speech in which two fundamentally unlike things are explicitly compared, usually in a phrase introduced by like or as. See also:
Etymology:
From Latin, "likeness" or "comparison"Examples and Observations:
- "He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow."
(George Eliot, Adam Bede) - "Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity."
(Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary) - "The harpsichord sounds like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof."
(Sir Thomas Beecham) - "Humanity, let us say, is like people packed in an automobile which is traveling downhill without lights at terrific speed and driven by a four-year-old child. The signposts along the way are all marked 'Progress.'"
(Lord Dunsany) - "Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep."
(Carl Sandburg) - "He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food."
(Raymond Chandler) - "The simile sets two ideas side by side; in the metaphor they become superimposed."
(F.L. Lucas) - "you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye"
(Margaret Atwood) - "She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat."
(James Joyce, "The Boarding House") - "She has a voice like a baritone sax issuing from an oil drum, and hams even with her silences."
(John Simon, reviewing Kathleen Turner in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, April 2005) - "Good coffee is like friendship: rich and warm and strong."
(slogan of Pan-American Coffee Bureau) - "Life is rather like a tin of sardines: we're all of us looking for the key."
(Alan Bennett) - "Matt Leinart slid into the draft like a bald tire on black ice."
(Rob Oller, Columbus Dispatch, Feb. 25, 2007)
Pronunciation: SIM-i-lee
