Hailstones the size of kumquats.

Monday turned into a dark and stormy afternoon. 

Suddenly, a shot rang out! 

No, that's not right. What happened was, we were warned that there might be strong winds, and hailstones up to 1" in diameter. Which is great if you own a Safelite franchise, but not too good for the rest of us. Later the hail forecast was revised down to maybe hail the size of peas, but as it turned out we just got wind and heavy rain. All gone in three hours. 

But I have to say: What is wrong with these people? Don't they know that meteorological phenomena are supposed to be compared to sporting equipment? It's tumors that get compared to fruits and vegetables. 

I've seen that remark elsewhere, but I am dead certain I first heard the observation out of George Carlin, then America's foremost observer of cultural language oddities, speaking with Don Imus on the latter's radio show. Carlin also noted how bizarre it would be if things got mixed up, like if the forecast called for hailstones the size of testicles. I think we can agree that would get our attention, though.

I have found that this observation holds true almost 100% of the time. People mentioning their operations say that the tumor or cyst of whatever that was removed was the size of a grape, an orange, a grapefruit, etc. But hailstones, which really are the only meteorological items that fit, come in sizes such as golf ball, baseball, and so on. 

This does put our local forecaster in a spot, though, because what sporting good is the size of a pea? What could he have told us Monday? Hailstones the size of the top of a golf tee? That doesn't do it. Sadly, small hailstones defy the common naming conventions. 

If you have any ideas for other small sizes in which hailstones may occur, please note them in comments. As for me, the day it's raining watermelons is the day I hide in church and wait for Jesus to come back.  

Bad analogies.

Bad analogies are as old as analogies. 

This has been making the rounds among my editorial acquaintances; no idea if it's real, but it's funny.

I'm particularly fond of #3, which I think is not bad at all, and #7. That one reminds me of a favorite from the BBC's Goon Show, spoken by Harry Secombe in the episode called "China Story": "In the darkness we sat huddled on the fiendish Chinese river-steamer, the silence broken only by the sound of the silence being broken." It's not an analogy exactly, but a kind of analogous tautology. Here's another, from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." 

The British may be very good at this bad-writing-for-effect stuff. 

The above may be bad analogies, but as I always say, to really screw up you need an expert. I, as a writer and editor, would like to present some bad analogies of my own. 

1. I tried to get him to talk, but his lips were clamped tighter than a dog's who got hold of a sock when you told him a hundred times to stop chewing on socks but he doesn't listen because he's a naughty boy, yes he is, yes he is.

2. It's as hot as a hot thing.

3. She was cute as a baby otter, and twice as smart.

4. It was pricier than a $1000 whore.

5. He had a phonographic memory.

6. He was as mad as a guy who got one of those fake scratch-off lottery tickets and fell for it like a dumdum.

7. He was hornier than an ibex who got thrown off Tinder.

8. Gout is really painful. She felt like she had gout in her heart. You can't get gout in your heart, but her heart hurt like she had.

9. "He's totally doornailed, man!"

10. She was free as a bird and crappin' on everybody. 

Okay, maybe they're not bad enough to be good, but they could be good enough to be bad!

Doornails: A review.

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
        Mind! I don't mean to say that I know of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the country's done for. You will, therefore, permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

So begins Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and while we best remember the expression "dead as a door-nail" from this introduction, Dickens makes it plain that the doornail predates him as a thing than which other things are as dead as.

So why a doornail?

Merriam-Webster doesn't even make any bones about it, defining "doornail" as "a large-headed nail - used chiefly in the phase dead as a doornail."

World Wide Words dates the phrase to at least 1350, and examines how it came to be:

The usual reason given is that a doornail was one of the heavy studded nails on the outside of a medieval door, or possibly that the phrase refers to the particularly big one on which the knocker rested. A doornail, because of its size and probable antiquity, would seem dead enough for any proverb; the one on which the knocker sat might be thought particularly dead because of the number of times it had been knocked on the head.  

    But William and Mary Morris, in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, quote a correspondent who points out that it could come from a standard term in carpentry. If you hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over on the inside so it can’t be removed again (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you can’t use it again. Doornails would very probably have been subjected to this treatment to give extra strength in the years before screws were available.

Screws? No way! You mean it's not nails anymore? I'm going to look into this right NOW!

Oh.

Well, "dead as a doorscrew" is probably not going to catch on.

But if no one uses doornails anymore, maybe we could come up with something new to be as dead as? After all, it's silly for doornails to only be used as things compared to which one might be said to have left this mortal coil. I grant you that you won't see a doornail get up and go dancing, but you won't see a toaster oven do that either and they're still all over the place. Nobody will be said to be as dead as a toaster oven.

So we need a new thing to be dead as. Something starting with a D, to keep that pleasant alliteration that goes so well with death. Maybe:

Dead as a dachshund

Dead as a DN100

Dead as a doody

Dead as a Denny's

Dead as a dodo

Dead as a Department of Motor Vehicles

Dead as a Datsun

Dead as a disco

Dead as a dandruff

Dead as a dik-dik

Dead as a dilophosaurus

Dead as a Doobie Brother

Dead as a Dickens

Dead as a dingleberry

Dead as Dumbledore

Dead as decorum

Mmmmmm... maybe this explains the continuing popularity of the doornail as a thing used for comparison purposes.

Say, if you were really sick, could you be said to be dead as half a doornail? Maybe if you got totally obliterated you would be dead as a whole box of doornails. There might be poetic considerations that even Dickens hasn't worked out.

Pace Dickens, I think the country will survive a little fooling around with a simile, don't you?

20 bad similes.

• Plays banjo like an angel
• Swift as the mighty oak
• Bakes like a ballerina
• Cold as Vanilla Ice
• Light as a balloon that has been filled up with light things, not a bunch of tiny pebbles like my cousin Mario once spent an entire afternoon doing when he was bored, because that would be heavy, not light
• Runs like diarrhea
• Small as something really small
• Fat as a pancake
• Tight as the seal on a CF8M (316), ISO 4144 standard stainless steel weld nipple
• Strong as a stink
• Hot as my spankin' hot Camaro, uh-huh, uh-huh
• Hairy as Grandpa Pete's nostrils
• French as a fry

Graceful as a bus station

• Happy as a stapler
• Waves breaking like water
• Proud as a mini golf course
• Groovy as a hepcat, daddy-o
• Tidy as a toddler
• Fartin' like a boss