Exam Gaffes!

"Apocryphal Metaphors from Student Essays"

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other
sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances
like underpants in a tumble dryer.

She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that
used to dangle from doors and would fly up whenever you banged the
door open again.

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

McMurphy fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a paper bag
filled with vegetable soup.

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

Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the
center.

Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

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

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

Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced
across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one
having left York at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from
Peterborough at 4:19p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the full stop after
the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who
had also never met.

The thunder was ominous sounding, much like the sound of a thin
sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a
play.

The red brick wall was the colour of a brick-red crayon.

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.

The door had been forced, as forced as the dialogue during the
interview portion of Family Fortunes.

Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

The plan was simple, like my brother Phil. But unlike Phil, this
plan just might work.

The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not
eating for a while.

"Oh, Jason, take me!" she panted, her breasts heaving like a
student on 31p-a-pint night.

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.

Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can
tell butter from "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter."

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

It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one
had ever seen before.

The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Glenda Jackson MP in
her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Robin Cook
MP, Leader of the House of Commons, in the House Judiciary Committee
hearings on the suspension of Keith Vaz MP.

The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender
leg behind her, like a dog at a lamppost.

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 cashpoint.

The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating
electric fan set on medium.

It was a working class tradition, like fathers chasing kids
around with their power tools.

He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells,
as if she were a dustcart reversing.

She was as easy as the Daily Star crossword.

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

She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

Her voice had that tense, grating quality, like a
first-generation thermal paper fax machine that needed a band
tightened.

It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple
it to the wall.