Here are some literary gems from Irish leaving cert essays. Sometimes the you can understand completely why they use the silly similes and amusing metaphors they do, but the results are rather amusing, so check out these funny phrases for yourself:

- 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.

- 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 centre.

- 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 Cork at 6:36p.m. travelling at 55 mph, the other from Dublin 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, Grandpa 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 and 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 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 ATM.

- 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.

Let me know if you have any similar examples of literary gems in the comments below!

Dan the man.

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