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simile in the solidity division, $100 for the best simile involving laughter. For classrooms, $100 for the best all-around class entry from elementary and middle schools (one simile per student in the class), and $100 for the best all-around class entry from a high school (one simile per student in the class).
• Be sure to include, name, address and telephone number. Classroom teachers should let me know the grade level and the name and address of the school.
That’s about the size of it. Last year 5,019 individuals and classrooms submitted entries. We wound up with more than 20,000 similes for “slender” and “exciting,” and the judging was close. “As slender as Cinderella’s ankle” won the slender division; “as exciting as a poached egg” took the other prize.
Originality counts most of all. In their 1991 collection of similes, Mike and Elyse Somer cataloged a few similes for “hard.” Novelist Mary Stewart spoke of “bread as hard as pumice.” E.B. White looked at “soil as hard as a bowling alley,” Russell Baker of The New York Times has a splendid sentence: “Americans like their fish, and fish roe too, fried hard as a bulletproof vest.”
A few others: Emerson wrote of “words as hard as cannonballs.” Dickens evidently was the first to speak of something “hard as nails.” Shakespeare wasn’t especially original: “hard as steel” would have been his entry. Other writers have come up with “hard as green apples,” “hard as an egg at Easter” and “hard as a billiard ball.”
All of us recognize that laughter comes in many forms. The Sommer collection lists similes for chuckles, giggles, grins, big laughs and little
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