A Simile is like a pair of eyeglasses: one side sees this, one side sees that, the device brings them together.- George McWhirter (an Irish author).
As a proof, there are a million similes, we meet them in every day's life,some of them make you smile like a jack-o'lantern, like a chain saw,like a Czechoslavakian novel, like a man advertising toothpaste, like the warm and gentle Samian sun.
Simile is a rhetorical figure expressing comparison or likeness that directly compares two objects through some connective words such as like, as, so, than. Similes can be found just above anywhere; from the printed word to oral conversation; in language, literature or music. Simile has 3 objects: the tenor, the vehicle and the link word. Simile semantically devided into: original and trite (as a metaphor), but structurally: ordinary and disguised in which the link between the tenor and the vehicle is expressed by notional verbs, such as to resemle, to seem, to look like, to appear.
For example:
- Orion ( Twain's brother) is as happy as a martyr when the fire won't burn.( Mark Twain, letter to his mother, Jane Lampton Clemens, 1872). Here the author compares the brother with the martyr. Original and ordinary simile.
I'd like also to share with you with thess "sweet" similes:
1. Music sweeter than the sweetest chime of magic bells by fairies set a -swinging.- Thomas Buchanan Read.
2. Sweet as a child's heart- lightening laugh to hear. - Algernon Charles Swinburne.
3. A secret sweet as songs of dawn that linnets sing when mists are gone.- Richard Monckton Milnes.
4. Sweet was her breath as the breath of kine that feed in the meadows. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
5. The Internet is an information highway as big as an elephant - Anonymous.
Similes can be used to enhance the quality of a piece of writing and it is one of the best ways to describe sights and sounds, so that it leaves a lasting image on the reader's mind. If you are writing a piece of fiction or any other literary work, always remember that you should use similes sparingly and in context to your writing!!!
