Sunday, January 30, 2011

This Week in Tortured Similes

From a Yahoo Sports Blog Post about Lamar Odom's offensive play:

And like a liquid that takes the shape of whatever container you pour it in, he can slide seamlessly into just about any role the game would call for

Got that? I mean, there's got to be a better way to phrase that. We all know what liquid is, right? I mean, even if we're of sub-normal intelligence, we're wildly familiar with the properties of liquid due to the fact that we drool all over ourselves. And anyone with a functional IQ has probably poured him or herself a glass of water or pissed in a beer bottle or what have you more times than he or she can count. Here's a hint to all you would-be-wordsmiths: if you have to overexplain either the vehicle or tenor of your figurative comparison, you are doing it wrong.

"The crowd roared like the load-roaring animal we commonly call a lion"

"Winning the NL Central was as easy as making one of the easiest baked dishes around--a pie!"

"Much as fish constrained by the small dimensions of a barrel are easy to shoot, so too was Kobe's uncontested slam dunk easy."

"Jay Mariotti is as dumb as a box of rocks, rocks not usually being known for their exceptional intelligence."

And so on to infinity.

1 comment:

Tonus said...

The lesson from this is: the next time you feel like channeling Bruce Lee... don't.