Detective O’Connor rubbed her head and furrowed her brow. She looked over the crime scene photos again and sighed. The case was like a bad simile: It seemed perfectly clear at first, but the more you thought about it, the less sense it made.
I picked my way through the rubble, thanking my good fortune that the mineshaft hadn’t collapsed completely. The cheap headlamp the mining company had given me was all but useless. It was supposed to be illuminating, but it barely shed light on anything at all. “Just like a bad simile,” I thought as I heaved a boulder out of my way.
Coach squinted. Frowned. The boy had an arm on him, that’s for sure. But he was gonna get in trouble if he didn’t stop acting like a bad simile, what with all the showboatin’, and only carin’ about makin’ himself look flashy and cool without givin’ any thought to what works in the overall context of the situation. Discipline. That’s what the boy needed.
Her heart was broken. How could she go on? She was still so young, and yet she felt certain the rest of her life would be like a bad epic simile: Long, convoluted, interminable, joyless, with some ups and downs, but mostly tedious, meandering, pointless, with absolutely no payoff whatsoever, because when you got to the end you would barely remember what you were hoping for in the first place.
The buzzing grew more intense. The bee flew into the window over and over, trying in vain to get free. Like a bad simile, you could see what it was going for, but it just wasn’t working.
The Nova-Blob, the most feared creature in the galaxy, is like a bad simile: Overly broad, amorphous, nebulous, and immune to laser blasts. Admiral Cephei could only look on in horror as the creature from deep space absorbed wave after wave of Star Jets and Ion Cruisers.
The runaway train was going over one hundred miles per hour when it crashed into the station. Like a bad simile, it was a total train wreck and also overly literal.
No one came to my barbecue. A solitary burger sizzled on the grill. Like a bad simile, the hamburger wasn’t even a simile at all, when you thought about it.
Michael hated going back to the suburbs. All the houses were identical. His old neighborhood was like a book that overuses similes—it was just the same construction and framework over and over and over again, and it quickly got very repetitive and boring.
Her mind was still reeling from the news. The world had been turned upside down, and everything everyone said to her sounded like a bad simile. It was all terribly written gibberish that made her want to shout, “What? What in the hell are you talking about? Are you insane? What is this nonsense? Did you think this was good? This is exhausting garbage.”
I put down the knife. “It’s about time we got a new cutting board,” I said. “This old one’s like a bad simile: worn out from overuse.” He looked up from his paper. “I think it’s more like a dead metaphor,” he said. That was the last straw.