- HOME
- INTRO TO THE FORUM
- USE AND MISUSE
- BADLY WRITTEN, BADLY SPOKEN
- GETTING
TO KNOW ENGLISH - PREPARING FOR ENGLISH PROFICIENCY TESTS
- GOING DEEPER INTO ENGLISH
- YOU ASKED ME THIS QUESTION
- EDUCATION AND TEACHING FORUM
- ADVICE AND DISSENT
- MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH
- STUDENTS' SOUNDING BOARD
- LANGUAGE HUMOR AT ITS FINEST
- THE LOUNGE
- NOTABLE WORKS BY OUR VERY OWN
- ESSAYS BY JOSE CARILLO
- Long Noun Forms Make Sentences Exasperatingly Difficult To Grasp
- Good Conversationalists Phrase Their Tag Questions With Finesse
- The Pronoun “None” Can Mean Either “Not One” Or “Not Any”
- A Rather Curious State Of Affairs In The Grammar Of “Do”-Questions
- Why I Consistently Use The Serial Comma
- Misuse Of “Lie” And “Lay” Punctures Many Writers’ Command Of English
- ABOUT JOSE CARILLO
- READINGS ABOUT LANGUAGE
- TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
- NEWS AND COMMENTARY
- BOOKSHOP
- ARCHIVES
LANGUAGE HUMOR AT ITS FINEST
Making yourself more proficient in English need not be a drag. You can actually speed up the learning process and make it fun by generously lacing it with humor—but preferably the best that the English language can offer.
In this new section, apart from giving a fixed slot to our weekly “In a Lighter Vein” pop-out humor piece in the Forum homepage, we have put together the finest of those weekly humor pop-ups since the Forum started. The best of them—collected from various sources on the web and sent in by friends—are all here, posted in the Forum under the following headings: Wordplay, On the Job, Student and School Life, and Miscellany.
So if you missed any of the best of the Forum’s weekly humor pop-ups, you can enjoy and savor them again and again here—and better still, share them with your friends!
Click here to go to the board (requires registration to post)
25 Ludicrously Funny Analogies
The following analogies were winning entries in the 1999 Style Invitational Contest of The Washington Post. The collection was taken from a posting in Judy Rose’s website, Writing English: The International Language of Business, entitled “The 25 Funniest Analogies.” They were ostensibly written by high school students and collected by high school English teachers—an attribution that turns out to be, well, double-whammy wrong. At any rate, the analogies are so revealing of guileless but funny English writing, whether done inadvertently or deliberately, so I thought I should share them with as many people as possible by posting it here in the Forum.
1. “Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster.”
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 machine.”
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. traveling 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 neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.”
16. “John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.”
17. “He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.”
18. “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.”
19. “Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.”
20. “The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.”
21. “The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.”
22. “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.”
23. “The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.”
24. “It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.”
25. “He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.”
—From Writing English: the International Language of Business by Judy Rose
Go to Wordplay now!
Go to On the Job now
Go to Student and School Life now!
Go to Miscellany now!
