A List of French Similes

Abstract

WE all have a tendency to express ourselves in comparisons. If we can find a strong simile, we have at hand a brief and "snappy" illustration which fixes the truth upon the mind somewhat as do the parables of Jesus, for after all a parable is but an extended simile. Some persons are capable of creating very suggestive similes, while others, unaided, make a fiasco of every attempt. It isn't everyone who can suggest that a thing is as useless "as a street-sprinkler in Venice" or "as a washing-machine in a nudist colony," to say nothing of something being as uninteresting "as a Florida newspaper in California." Then we have similes that are of ironical and comical effect, e.g."clear as mud," "to swim like a stone," "to fit like a round peg in a square hole," etc. Some of the French variety are suggested by Ch. Bally in his "Trait6 de Stylistique frangaise," and have been incorporated into the list submitted below, under "clear" and "fit." One of the good French jokes which goes the rounds and which appeared in the little student paper, Le Petit Journal, February 1, 1935, and in the Courrier des tats-Unis, June 25, 1933, is that of the patient who consulted the doctor who, upon learning that he "worked like a horse," "ate like a wolf," and was "tired as a dog" each evening, advised him to consult a veterinary. These similes occur in the present list. We hear the expression in English, "knee-high to a grasshopper." A certain advertisement in the Courrier des Ftats-Unis of December 4, 1935, p. 3, brings us face to face with the equivalent expression in French, with the difference that the French comparison does not carry the hyperbole so far as the English. The advertisement concerns dogs and is in the form of a question: "Vous rappelez-vous, lorsque vous 6tiez haut comme trois pommes, comme vous d siriez poss6der un jeune toutou, plus que n'importe quoi au monde?" Not wishing to be too sensational, I have listed this simile under "small" and "tall."