Note the word "anal" in the word "analogies"

ANALOGIES ARE A COOL PART OF LANGUAGE.

And they can be fun too -- whether they work correctly or, even moreso, when they don't.

I'm a writer by trade.

Generally, I try to avoid making analogies if I can unless I absolutely know they work perfectly and no one could possibly not get the parallel or comparison I'm trying to make.

Analogies can work exceptionally well, or they can fail miserably. I tend to use them more in every day speech than I do in other ways.

For example:

"He's built like a brick shit house."
"Homo Escapeons has a face only a mother could love."

Anyway, all of this is a phoney lead-in to something I got from a fellow writer this week, and which I hope gives you a few giggles. These are actual analogies used in essays assigned to high school students.

But a final question before you read them...what is your favourite analogy of all time?

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. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

8. 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.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. 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. travelling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighbourhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.