School's Out for the Summer!

 

 

     School has just ended at our community college. Classes are over for the year. Exams are done and gone. I've volunteered to tutor for the first summer session, which is just now starting, but after this I'll take off the rest of the summer from my volunteer job.

     Still, no matter how old we get, or how long it's been since we've walked around campus, there's a certain thrill that comes at this time of year. Because it's vacation time. We look forward to the warm, lazy days. School's out for the summer.

     In commemoration, I bring you the best of what are presented as "actual" quotes from English exam essays, courtesy of a humor site called tickld, with a little help from another site called snopes.
  
     These happen to be analogies and metaphors presumably found in high school essays. Most are more imaginative than what I've seen from my students:

     "His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free."

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

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

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

     "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."

from Buzzfeed's Best Yearbook Quotes of 2014

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

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

     "Hailstones leaped from the pavement, 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 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."

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

     "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."

     "The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law 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."

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

     "It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools."

     "He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up."

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