Theory revision. 1. What is a simile and what is a simple comparison?

1. What is a simile and what is a simple comparison?

2. What semantic poles of a simile do you know?

3. Which of the link words have you met most often?

4. What is the foundation of the simile?

5. What is the key of the simile?

6. What is a trite simile? Give examples.

7. What is an epic simile?

8. What is a disguised simile?

9. What are the main functions of a simile?

10. Find examples of similes in your reading. State their type, structure and functions.

Exercise III. Discuss the following cases of simile. Pay attention to the semantics of the tenor and the vehicle, to the briefer sustained manner of their presentation. Indicate the foundation of the simile, both explicit and implicit. Find examples of disguised similes, do not miss the link word joining the two parts of the structure:

1. The menu was rather less than a panorama, indeed, it was as repetitious as a snore. (O.N.)

2. The topic of the Younger Generation spread through the company like a yawn. (E.W.)

3. Penny-in-the-slot machines stood there like so many vacant faces, their dials glowing and flickering - for nobody. (B.N.)

4. As wet as a fish - as dry as a bone;

As live as a bird - as dead as a stone; As plump as a partridge - as crafty as a rat;

As strong as a horse - as weak as a cat; As hard as a flint - as soft as a mole; As white as a lily - as black as coal; As plain as a pike - as rough as a bear; As tight as a dram - as free as the air; As heavy as lead - as light as a feather; As steady as time - uncertain as weather; As hot as an oven - as cold as a frog; As gay as a lark - as sick as a dog; As savage as a tiger - as mild as ц dove; As stiff as a poker - as limp as a glove; As blind as a bat - as deaf as a post; As cool as a cucumber - as warm as toast; As flat as a flounder - as round as a ball; As blunt as a hammer - as sharp as an awl; As brittle as glass - as tough as gristle; As neat as a pin - as clean as a whistle; As red as a rose - as square as a box. (O.N.)

5. She has always been as live as a bird. (R.Ch.)

6. She was obstinate as a mule, always had been, from a child. (G.)

7. Children! Breakfast is just as good as any other meal and I won't have you gobbling like wolves. (Th.W.)

8. Six o'clock still found him in indecision. He had had no appetite for lunch and the muscles of his stomach fluttered as though a flock of sparrows was beating their wings against his insides. (Wr.)

9. And the cat, released, leaped and perched on her shoulder: his tail swinging like a baton, conducting rhapsodic music. (T.C.)

10. He felt that his presence must, like a single drop of some stain, tincture the crystal liquid that was absolutely herself. (R.W.)

11. He has a round kewpie's face. He looks like an enlarged, elderly, bald edition of the village fat boy, a sly fat boy, congenitally indolent, a practical joker, a born grafter and con merchant. (O'N.)

12. You could have knocked me down with a feather when he said all those things to me. I felt just like Balaam when his ass broke into light conversation. (S.M.)

13. Two footmen leant against the walls looking as waxen as the clumps of flowers sent up that morning from hothouses in the country. (E.W.)

14. The Dorset Hotel was built in the early eighteen hundreds and my room, like many an elderly lady, looks its best in subdued light. (J.Br.)

15. For a long while - for many years in fact - he had not thought of how it was before he came to the farm. His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and where the furniture has rotted away. But tonight it was as if lamps had been lighted through all the gloomy dead rooms. (T.C.)

16. It was an unforgettable face, and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland spring. (J.F.)

17. He ached from head to foot, all zones of pain seemingly interdependent. He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective. (S.)

18. Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all nor for how long she will stay. (Gr.M.)

19. You're like the East, Dinny. One loves it at first sight or not at all and one never knows it any better. (G.)

20. He felt like an old book: spine defective, covers dull, slight foxing, fly missing, rather shaken copy. (J.Br.)

21. Susan at her piano lesson, playing that thing of Scarlatti's. The sort of music, it struck him, that would happen if the bubbles in a magnum of champagne were to rush up rhythmically and as they reached the surface, burst into sound as dry and tangy as the wine from whose depth they had arisen. The simile pleased him so much. (A.H.)

22. There was no moon, a clear dark, like some velvety garment, was wrapped around the trees, whose thinned branches, resembling plumes, stirred in the still, warm air. (G.)

23. There are in every large chicken-yard a number of old and indignant hens who resemble Mrs. Bogart and when they are served at Sunday noon dinner, as fricasseed chicken with thick dumplings, they keep up the resemblance. (S.L.)

24. H.G.Wells r.eminded her of the rice paddies in her native California. Acres and acres of shiny water but never more than two inches deep. (A.H.)

25. On the wall hung an amateur oil painting of what appeared to be a blind man's conception of fourteen whistling swan landing simultaneously in the Atlantic during a half-gale. (Jn.B.)

26. Today she had begun by watching the flood. The water would crouch and heave at a big boulder fallen off the bluff-side and the red-and-white foam would fly. It reminded her of the blood-streaked foam every heave would fling out of the nostrils of a windbroke horse. (R.W.)

27. I'm not nearly hot enough to draw a word-picture that would do justice to that extraordinarily hefty crash. Try to imagine the Albert Hall falling on the Crystal Palace and you will have got the rough idea. (P.G.W.)

28. Her startled glance descended like a beam of light, and settled for a moment on the man's face. He was fortyish and rather fat, with a moustache that made her think of the yolk of an egg, and a nose that spread itself. His face had an injected redness. (W.D.)

29. Huddled in her grey fur against the sofa cushions she had a strange resemblance to a captive owl bunched in its soft feathers against the wires of a cage. The supple erectness of her body was gone, as though she had been broken by cruel exercise, as though there were no longer any reason for being beautiful, and supple, and erect. (G.)

30. Someone might have observed in him a peculiar resemblance to those plaster reproductions of the gargoyles of Notre Dame which may be seen in the shop windows of artists' colourmen. (E.W.)

31. Walser felt the strangest sensation, as if these eyes of the trapeze gymnast were a pair of sets of Chinese boxes, as if each one opened into a world into a world, an infinite plurality of worlds, and these unguessable guests exercised the strongest possible attraction, so that he felt himself trembling as if he, too, stood on an unknown threshold. (An.C.)

32. All was elegant, even sumptuous, finished with a heavy rather queasy luxury that always seemed to have grime under its fingernails, the luxury peculiar to this country. (An.C.)

Лабораторная работа №11. (2 ч.)