“Wanting quantity over quality in friendships shows you don’t understand that word. It’s like complaining about not having enough genitals — you should really focus on working with what you have instead of adding more for the sake of it.”
Luke McKinney, Cracked.com, on social networking
“Yes, there was Cracked’s feed and its award-deserving observations, but buried as they were within a hundred other gerbil turds of nonsense, after a couple minutes I simply gave up and scrolled past all the debate spam, looking for my regular gerbil turds of delight.”
“I just came by so you could apologize for saying I tried to kiss you, when it was your royal tongue that tried to storm my mouth-castle.”
“Village Idiot” JD to “Princess” Elliot, Scrubs
“Bill Clinton slices through Mitt Romney’s bullshit like the light saber he is.”
Patton Oswalt, via Twitter
“You know what we called fruits and vegetables at my school? Nerd grenades.”
John Stewart, The Daily Show, on schools offering healthier lunches to students
“Fighting against it is like slogging through the Swamp of Sadness in The NeverEnding Story: you can head into it as optimistically as you like, but by the end you will be so overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of unapologetic nastiness and disrespect that, at the very least, a horse somewhere will die from it, probably.”
Soren Bowie, Cracked.com, on plagiarism and copyright infringement on the internet
“Romney wants to let the — he said in the first hundred days he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, ‘unchain Wall Street.’ They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”
Joe Biden, on Republican policy
“It’s like watching McDonald’s debate Burger King over whose fries are healthier.”
J. Aigner, via Facebook, on the Presidential Debates
“So one summer you are reading A Wrinkle in Time or Fantastic Mr. Fox or whatever, and then you show up for your first day of school and BAM, The Scarlet Letter. And get on that pronto, kid, because we are going to talk about metaphors and symbolism in Chapter 1 tomorrow. I opened these books thinking they would be great and rewarding, like the books I was used to, but it was like biting into a delicious-looking cake and finding a bear trap. After my face had been so destroyed by so many bear traps (to continue the metaphor) that the greatest reconstructive surgeon in the world could do nothing to save it, I stopped looking at books as wonderful presents I couldn’t wait to open and started looking at them with a sort of low-level PTSD.”
Christina H, Cracked.com, on school reading
“They see the national debt clock staring them in the face. They see a debt crisis, and they just ignore and pretend it didn’t even happen.”
Paul Ryan, comparing Obama to the NFL replacement referees
“Physicists hate the term. Higgs hates the term. It’s like discovering a vital new gene in neurology and calling it the Kardashian….”
Luke McKinney, Cracked.com, on calling the Higgs boson the “God Particle.”
“Imagine you’re walking down the street and suddenly you see a sandwich hovering in front of you. Hovering sandwiches being your favorite kind, you reach out for it, and are instantly devoured by a nearby monster disguised as a minivan.”
Monte Richard & E. Reid Ross, Cracked.com, on angler fish.
“But then came the sequels — most notable for setting the land-speed record for the fastest time anything has traveled all the way back up its own ass.”
Robert Brockway, Cracked.com, on The Matrix series
“The human brain is equipped with “hedonic set points” which not only establish where our base mood is (optimistic, pessimistic or indifferent); but also adapts rather quickly to our surroundings and returns to our base frame of mind. Basically, we all have a built-in buzzkill app.”
Kimmy Dee, Cracked.com, on happiness
“…a sugar-coated satan sandwich.”
Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), on the debt deal
“…a zoo of carefully showcased remnants that never get up and walk around their cages; somber, sterile, impersonal, about as pointless as listening to a soundtrack of Bruce Lee action scenes while staring at a blank screen.”
Tony Maxwell, Monkees.net, on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum
“… Humane protection of women and the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy – our next generation of American children….”
Bob Vander Plaats, The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMILY
For those of you who keep emailing us, we KNOW they’re similes.
You’re not being smart. You’re not being helpful. And by pointing out that we have similes on here, you’re not demonstrating that you have a bigger penis than us. In fact, the collective Voltron penis formed by all of our members’ members (even the female ones) will easily pistol-whip your little twig.
See, now THAT’s a metaphor.
Bad Metaphors is not a literary site. It’s supposed to be a place to go for a smile or a laugh. If you can’t handle the fact that we post examples of both metaphors and similes, maybe you’ll have more fun at Wikipedia.
“Editing is just like writing, except hateful, and in reverse. Instead of birthing words and ideas out of nothing, you’re murdering them in cold blood, culling them like sickly sheep weakening the flock.”
Robert Brockway, Cracked.com
“Seriously, man. Jews. We’re Jews. When you look at our pubic hair, it should look like Ewoks should be in there….
“That’s right, the foliage in my pubic hair is like the planet Endor. That’s what I’m suggesting.”
John Stewart, the Daily Show, on Anthony Weiner’s lack of body hair
“If ever in life you find yourself thinking of a group of human beings as nonhuman — be it cartoonish caricatures or monsters or whatever — you’ve gone wrong. If you’re ever making an entire race or gender the watermelon in your Gallagher routine, you’re making yourself a worse person and making the world a worse place.”
David Wong, Cracked.com, on racist jokes
“The entire practice is insane and stupid. I know this. It puts me in a permanent blind spot; an unannounced lane change will guaranteed kill me; I essentially volunteer to become the meat in a crushing steel sandwich.”
Ezekiel Buchheit, Cracked.com, on lane-splitting on a motorcycle
“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.”
Via the Washington Post’s Style Invitational
Kim Kardashian, newly engaged, with a $2-million engagement ring: “I finally found my missing puzzle piece! I’m complete.”
ABC News anchor: “Does she mean the guy or the stone?”
“Medicine in the 19th century was so medieval it might as well have walked around in a tunic and leggings while strumming a lute.”
Jacopo della Quercia, Cracked.com, on Civil War casualties
“I’m beginning to think these are not perfect storms. I’m beginning to think these are regular storms and we have a shitty boat.”
John Stewart, the Daily Show, on the constant mentions of a “perfect storm” of events leading to a stock market crash
“Electricity is just a flow of electrons from some place that has too many of them to some place that really wants them. But where they really want to go is to the ground. If generated power is a shipload of sailors on shore leave, the ground is a whore house that’s having a two-for-one special.”
Martin Bear, Cracked.com
“…he floored it into a straightaway, weaving through traffic with the creamy ease and sleazy skill of a buttered gigolo.”
Robert Brockway, Cracked.com
“The giant panda is the Kim Kardashian of the animal world. It has big eyes, curves in the right places, and is ever-photogenic. It gets by on its good looks alone, while more deserving animals (the Yangtze River crocodile, hello??) are simply ignored by the world’s animators and toy-makers.”
Kristie Lu Stout, CNN.com
“….I’ve still got all my points saved on my computer somewhere, and I’d be happy to regurgitate them here. I’m offering you my pre-digested leftovers, basically.”
Online conversation between two writers for Cracked.com
“A-Frame Structure: A building shaped in the configuration of an inverted V….”
“You know, in the horror movie you kill the monster, and the hand re-emerges. And if you’re not looking, the hand grows back and then the monster’s there again. That cannot be allowed to happen.”
Rudy Giuliani, on terrorism
“When they called it ‘the building blocks of life,’ you probably pictured DNA as a series of neatly edged Legos snapping together to form a cohesive whole. When in reality, DNA is more like an old scrapbook that someone has torn up, pasted back together, filled with old newspaper clippings about murder and then taken into the bathroom with them.”
C. Coville, Cracked.com
“Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.”
Via the Washington Post’s Style Invitational
“Friends, the press and the government are in bed together in an embrace so intimate and wrong, they could spoon on a twin mattress and still have room for Ted Koppel. Journalists used to questions the reasons for war and expose abuse of power. Now, like toothless babies, they suckle on the sugary teat of misinformation and poop it into the diaper we call the 6:00 News. Demand more of your government. Demand more of your press.”
Kent Brockman, The Simpsons
“I truly believe that that is going to take an individual that has testicular fortitude.”
Paul Gibson, president of the Sheet Metal Workers’ Union, on Hillary Clinton
“I’m mulling over a story. I think I know what direction I’m going, but haven’t put pen to paper.”
“Don’t put pen to paper. Put finger to keyboard. It tends to be faster.”
“That sounds dirty.”
“Well, that depends on whose keyboard you’re putting your fingers to….”
Exchange between unidentified writer and editor
Here are 50 office-speak phrases we love to hate, according to BBC News.
Some of our favorites:
“Going forward”
“Idea showers”
“Incentivise”
“Let’s touch base about that offline”
“Low hanging fruit”
“Conversate”
“360-degree thinking”
“Get all my ducks in a row”
“At the end of the day”
“Cascading down”
“Actioning”
“You can’t have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music.”
Anyone care to add their own?
“Planned Parenthood is the LensCrafters of big abortion.”
“Touch it gently, put two fingers inside. If it’s wide, use three fingers. Make sure it’s wet, and rub up & down.”
Instructions on how to wash a cup
Bad Metaphors 