That fella’s the raspberry seed in my wisdom tooth.  -The Music Man

You can almost feel it, can’t you? That tiny, irritating raspberry seed lodged in your tooth (or worse yet, in your gums).

A good metaphor or simile breathes life into a sentence. It helps the reader’s mind make fresh correlations between smells, sounds, taste, touch. A bad metaphor kills the sentence deader than a chainsaw murderer wielding a plastic chainsaw from Toys R Us. Get the idea?

Before we launch into today’s examples of putrid prose, allow me to refresh your memory about the difference between a metaphor and a simile:

• Metaphor - a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them (as in drowning in money)
• Simile - Using like or as to compare two unlike things (as in cheeks like roses)

One of the best places to find funny figures of speech is in student-written essays. Here are some ‘winners’ from excerpts submitted by English teachers across the U.S. (vote for your favorites!)

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. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes
   just before it throws up.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was
   room-temperature Canadian beef.
5. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
6. McBride fell twelve stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag
   filled with vegetable soup.
7. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
8. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry
   them in hot grease.
9. 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.
10. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil,
    this plan just might work.
11. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating
    for a while.
12. 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.
13. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg
    behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
14. 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.
15. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with
    power tools.
16. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a
    bowling ball wouldn’t.
17. 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.
18. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as
    if she were a garbage truck backing up.
19. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

Which one made you laugh hardest?