This simile is forced and ugly.
But he always declared that philosophy and science were in the same boat, a boat which, as in Neurath's simile, we are forced to rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it.
Common Ground is stuffed with writing like this – portentous and pronouncing, full of forced metaphors and fanciful mixed similes that have us flying from bird to bee in one paragraph.
The impression created by mapping this incomprehension onto the double-take that the simile forces on its reader or auditor is strange.
Instigating a riot and forcing people from their homes because your shirt got a little bit burnt beats any witty simile I can think of to illustrate how ridiculously petulant this is.
Scores of smart metaphors and similes zip by; "their faces set with the pinched look of angry vegans"; "forcing the cheer like Christmas lights in the poor part of town".
PAUL MULDOON: My own favorite simile/metaphor that is at once moving and mentally stimulating is to be found in John Donne's "The Flea," a poem in which the beloved is discouraged from squashing a flea because it would force her to commit three sins at once — suicide, murder, and sacrilege.
The poetry tends to be oblique, with Henry Shukman an exception of clarity and force; MR Peacocke's "Simile" is worth getting to the end of.
From where will we draw replacement similes and language?
(A simile as weak as a forced apology).
Who now cultivates or reveres the sharp-edged art of the epigram, the well-placed flourish, the daring trope, the Shandyan excursus, the smart simile, Ciceronian copiousness, Senecan taciturnity, cunning variation of pace, tone, tempo and rhetorical force -- that whole repertory of effects subsumed under the word "prose"?
