Search results for 'tag:Analogies tag:Jokes' matching tags 'Analogies' and 'Jokes'

Teen metaphor :P

Tearsofjoy — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:31:54 GMT

We've been told these are actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. Yeah, as if.

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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 storeys, 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 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.

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, Grandpappy 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.

26. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

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

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

Enjoy!

- Joy

Re: A strange sentence?

ryan smith — Mon, 31 May 2004 08:42:25 GMT

"what is a colourful painting for one is just a blank sheet of paper for the other"

Nice analogy! I hereby request permission to use it once in a while.

These kinds of English oddities are exactly what make for misunderstandings, things getting lost in translation, jokes falling flat.

Re: What does FOO mean?

Guest — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 06:27:18 GMT

hi mike!

foo ...

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foo: /foo/
1. interj. Term of disgust.

2. [very common] Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything, esp. programs and files (esp. scratch files).

3. First on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used in syntax examples. See also bar, baz, qux, quux, garply, waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, thud.

When âfooâ is used in connection with âbarâ it has generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR (âFucked Up Beyond All Repairâ or âFucked Up Beyond All Recognitionâ), later modified to foobar. Early versions of the Jargon File interpreted this change as a post-war bowdlerization, but it it now seems more likely that FUBAR was itself a derivative of âfooâ perhaps influenced by German furchtbar (terrible) â âfoobarâ may actually have been the original form.

For, it seems, the word âfooâ itself had an immediate prewar history in comic strips and cartoons. The earliest documented uses were in the Smokey Stover comic strip published from about 1930 to about 1952. Bill Holman, the author of the strip, filled it with odd jokes and personal contrivances, including other nonsense phrases such as âNotary Sojacâ and â1506 nix nixâ. The word âfooâ frequently appeared on license plates of cars, in nonsense sayings in the background of some frames (such as âHe who foos last foos bestâ or âMany smoke but foo men chewâ), and Holman had Smokey say âWhere there's foo, there's fireâ.

According to the Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion Holman claimed to have found the word âfooâ on the bottom of a Chinese figurine. This is plausible; Chinese statuettes often have apotropaic inscriptions, and this one was almost certainly the Mandarin Chinese word fu (sometimes transliterated foo), which can mean âhappinessâ or âprosperityâ when spoken with the rising tone (the lion-dog guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese restaurants are properly called âfu dogsâ). English speakers' reception of Holman's âfooâ nonsense word was undoubtedly influenced by Yiddish âfehâ and English âfooeyâ and âfoolâ.

Holman's strip featured a firetruck called the Foomobile that rode on two wheels. The comic strip was tremendously popular in the late 1930s, and legend has it that a manufacturer in Indiana even produced an operable version of Holman's Foomobile. According to the Encyclopedia of American Comics, âFooâ fever swept the U.S., finding its way into popular songs and generating over 500 âFoo Clubs.â The fad left âfooâ references embedded in popular culture (including a couple of appearances in Warner Brothers cartoons of 1938-39; notably in Robert Clampett's âDaffy Docâ of 1938, in which a very early version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying âSILENCE IS FOO!â) When the fad faded, the origin of âfooâ was forgotten.

One place âfooâ is known to have remained live is in the U.S. military during the WWII years. In 1944-45, the term âfoo fightersâ was in use by radar operators for the kind of mysterious or spurious trace that would later be called a UFO (the older term resurfaced in popular American usage in 1995 via the name of one of the better grunge-rock bands). Because informants connected the term directly to the Smokey Stover strip, the folk etymology that connects it to French âfeuâ (fire) can be gently dismissed.

The U.S. and British militaries frequently swapped slang terms during the war (see kluge and kludge for another important example) Period sources reported that âFOOâ became a semi-legendary subject of WWII British-army graffiti more or less equivalent to the American Kilroy. Where British troops went, the graffito âFOO was hereâ or something similar showed up. Several slang dictionaries aver that FOO probably came from Forward Observation Officer, but this (like the contemporaneous âFUBARâ) was probably a backronym . Forty years later, Paul Dickson's excellent book âWordsâ (Dell, 1982, ISBN 0-440-52260-7) traced âFooâ to an unspecified British naval magazine in 1946, quoting as follows: âMr. Foo is a mysterious Second World War product, gifted with bitter omniscience and sarcasm.â

Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that hacker usage actually sprang from FOO, Lampoons and Parody, the title of a comic book first issued in September 1958, a joint project of Charles and Robert Crumb. Though Robert Crumb (then in his mid-teens) later became one of the most important and influential artists in underground comics, this venture was hardly a success; indeed, the brothers later burned most of the existing copies in disgust. The title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover. However, very few copies of this comic actually circulated, and students of Crumb's oeuvre have established that this title was a reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics. The Crumbs may also have been influenced by a short-lived Canadian parody magazine named âFooâ published in 1951-52.

An old-time member reports that in the 1959 Dictionary of the TMRC Language, compiled at TMRC, there was an entry that went something like this:

FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase âFOO MANE PADME HUM.â Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning.

(For more about the legendary foo counters, see TMRC.) This definition used Bill Holman's nonsense word, then only two decades old and demonstrably still live in popular culture and slang, to a ha ha only serious analogy with esoteric Tibetan Buddhism. Today's hackers would find it difficult to resist elaborating a joke like that, and it is not likely 1959's were any less susceptible. Almost the entire staff of what later became the MIT AI Lab was involved with TMRC, and the word spread from there.

cheers!
Jas