Similes Dictionary

Description

Language "Appealing As Sunlight After a Storm."


A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end. —Henry David Thoreau

Prose consists of … phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. —George Orwell


Whether it invokes hard work or merely a hen-house, a good simile is like a good picture—it's worth a thousand words. Packed with more than 16,000 imaginative, colorful phrases—from “abandoned as a used Kleenex” to “quiet as an eel swimming in oil”—the Similes Dictionary will help any politician, writer, or lover of language find just the right saying, be it original or banal, verbose or succinct. Your thoughts will never be "as tedious as a twice-told tale" or "dry as the Congressional Record." Choose from elegant turns of phrases “as useful as a Swiss army knife” and “varied as expressions of the human face”.


Citing more than 2,000 sources—from the Bible, Socrates, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and H. L. Mencken to popular movies, music, and television shows—the Similes Dictionary covers hundreds of subjects broken into thematic categories that include topics such as virtue, anger, age, ambition, importance, and youth, helping you find the fitting phrase quickly and easily.


Perfect for setting the atmosphere, making a point, or helping spin a tale with economy, intelligence, and ingenuity, the vivid comparisons found in this collection will inspire anyone.


Love comforteth like sunshine after rain. —William Shakespeare

A face like a bucket —Raymond Chandler

A man with little learning is like the frog who thinks its puddle a great sea. —Burmese proverb

Peace, like charity, begins at home —Franklin Delano Roosevelt

You know a dream is like a river ever changing as it flows. —Garth Brooks

Fit as a fiddle —John Ray’s Proverbs

He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. —Arthur Miller

Ring true, like good china. —Sylvia Plath

Music yearning like a God in pain —John Keats

Busy as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. —Pat Conroy

Enduring as mother love —Anonymous

Sujets

• Writting
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Shakespeare's plays
• Mark Twain

Informations

• Publié par: Visible Ink Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781578594696
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

S IMILES D ICTIONARY
Copyright ©2013 by Visible Ink Press®
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Managing Editor: Kevin S. Hile Art Director: Mary Claire Krzewinski Typesetting: Marco Di Vita Proofreaders: Sharon R. Gunton
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sommer, Elyse.
Similes dictionary / by Elyse Sommer. Second Edition.
pages cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-57859-433-7 (pbk.)
1. Quotations, English. 2. Simile Dictionaries. I. Sommer, Elyse, editor of compilation. II. Title.
PN6084.S5S55 2013
082 dc23
2013000154
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C ONTENTS
How to Use This Book
Introduction
Table of Thematic Categories
The Similes
Author Index

H OW TO U SE THIS B OOK
Similes Dictionary is designed for the browser’s enjoyment and inspiration and as a thesaurus for writers and speakers. Because many similes are complete little quotes, the book also serves as a quotation finder.
To best fulfill all these functions, the more than 16,000 entries have been grouped into nearly 1,300 thematic categories to ease and expedite access to them. The Table of Thematic Categories at the front of the book contains an alphabetical list that includes the subject categories, synonyms, and See and See Also cross references. All categories and synonyms with their cross references are also included in the text.
Cross references pertaining to the category in general appear after the thematic heading.
How to Locate Similes through the Subject Headings
Since this is a phrase book, most readers will be best served by searching through the thematic categories to find the phrases that interest them. Taking the thesaurus approach, turn first to the Table of Thematic Categories and go to a heading most likely to lead you to the similes that interest you. If you looked up ABILITY, you will find that it is a main heading and also a cross reference to a thematically related heading, ACCOMPLISHMENT. If you looked under ACCURACY, you would find it listed as a synonym, with a cross reference to the main heading, CORRECTNESS.
How to Locate Similes by Browsing
Taking the browser’s approach, go right to the entries and let the thematic headings and cross references in the text guide you through your ramble.
How to Locate Similes by a Specific Author
If you’re curious who said what, turn to the Author’s Index and look up the categories for the author whose similes you want to see. If an author’s listing includes many entries, you can limit your search to just a few thematic categories.
How to Locate Familiar Similes
The search for a specific familiar phrase can often be narrowed down to similes from Shakespeare, early writers and poets like Chaucer, Shelley, Swinburne, Tennyson and Longfellow. All can be tracked through the Authors Index.
Things to Bear in Mind When Reading the Entries
Spelling and punctuation in entries from printed sources is as it appeared there. The exception to this are words with spelling common only in England, e.g.: colour, favour, grey, honour, moustaches, odour, which appear as color, favor, gray, honor, mustaches, odour.
Some similes contain modernized words and phrases, but such changes are always called to the reader’s attention, with the original form in a comment paragraph after the entry. The same holds true for dialect words and phrases.
When the descriptive reference frame for a simile is not crucial to its meaning but would enhance reading or shed light on its use, a word or phrase preceding the simile is included in the entry. Such additional text is enclosed in parenthethes. This keeps the focus on the simile and maintains the alphabetizing by simile system. Unless the parenthesized text is a complete sentence, the first word of the actual entry is not capitalized, e.g.:
(Gaze as) innocent as a teddy bear Babs H. Deal
When additional text is in square brackets, the words are not the author’s but inserted for clarity by the editors. If this bracketed text precedes the simile, the entry is capitalized since it does not continue the author’s words, e.g.:
[School boys] Frail, like thin-boned fledgling birds clamoring for food Sylvia Berkman
Words in parenthethes or brackets may also appear in the middle or at the end of an entry, e.g.:
My efforts [to stir husband out of a sense of doom] have been like so many waves, dashing against the Rock of Ages Robert E. Sherwood
To enhance the browser’s enjoyment and increase the book’s utility, many similes include brief comments. These can include any or all of the following: information about the simile, its source, examples of variations, cross references specific to that simile.
I NTRODUCTION
I’m as corny as Kansas in August, I’m as normal as blueberry pie. Oscar Hammerstein "A Wonderful Guy" South Pacific
The simile that describes the resemblance between two dissimlar things, usually flagging up the comparison with "as" or "like," has been a literary device to lend color to the English language since time immemorial. Musical theater legend Oscar Hammerstein was a master "similist," often piling on his vivid comparisons for added effect. "A Wonderful Guy," from the classic South Pacific, expanded on the famous "I’m corny as Kansas in August / I’m as normal as blueberry pie" with "I’m as trite and as gay as a daisy in May" and "I’m bromidic and bright / As a moon-happy night / Pourin’ light on the dew!"
Its effectiveness for expressing thoughts more clearly and vividly makes the simile one of most widely used figures of speech in written and spoken English. Similes crop up in newspaper and magazine articles, fiction and nonfiction, dramas as well as daily conversations. The ones with the most zip tend to metamorphose into common expressions that are are used unchanged or refreshed. In the age of sound bites and tweets they are more than ever timely and, to borrow an ever-popular simile, useful as a Swiss army knife for drawing pithy word sketches that are more robust than a single word and more spontaneous than a formal quote.
Since many similes are "as old as old as the hills" and also as fresh as today’s newspaper headline whether printed or online a collection of examples can never really be complete. The seemingly overflowing well of similes from biblical times to the present keeps filling up. Thus, a book like Similes Dictionary is never really finished. I’m therefore delighted to have a chance to amend and update the first edition.
Besides expanding on the entries of writers with a special propensity for the simile, this new edition has afforded me a chance to include comparison phrases from works published in the last few years, some of which proved especially fertile. That meant adding similes from Cynthia Ozick’s latest books, as well as newly published authors like Helen Simonson (Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand).
My main activity since compiling the first edition post has been as editor and publisher of Curtainup, an online theater magazine. Naturally, this has led me to many apt examples in dramatic dialogue and songs with which to enrich this new edition. Few song writers can match oscar Hammerstein’s gift for poetic figures of speech that sing gloriously. However, there are plenty of pithy examples from old-timers like Irving Berlin (When I’m with a pistol / I sparkle like a crystal, / Yes, I shine like the morning sun. / But I lose all my luster / When with a Bronco Buster. "You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun" from Annie Get Your Gun).
Living song writers also incorporate similes into their oeuvre, like this one from singer / songwriter Sting: Like a circle in a spiral / Like a wheel within a wheel / Never ending or beginning, / On an ever spinning wheel / As the images unwind / Like the circles that you find / In the windmills of your mind. Sting’s title, "The Windmills Of Your Mind," introduces a metaphor to the song’s panoply of similes.
The similes included in this sort of collection tend to be more fragmentary than quotes in a book of quotations. The first edition cited the author but in most instances omitted the title of the source. Since a number of readers wrote asking for the plays in which to find the many Shakespeare citations, I’ve added them for this edition and decided to also include book, play, or song titles as well as the author’s name for all new entries.
Still on the subject of source attribution, we decided to give the author-plus-title treatment to one other writer, Raymond Chandler. The prolific detective novelist is noted for his terse, witty tropes, so much so that they’ve come to be known as Chandlerisms and are often given new life; for example, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd (in her April 10, 2012 Op-Ed piece "State of Cool") incorporated one of Chandler’s sharp similes to describe photo images of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as follows: "The pictures, as Raymond Chandler would say, make Hillary look ‘as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.’"
Sources tapped for new entries once aga