[Image credit: Stuart Miles]

The quote in the title makes me giggle (although it’s not grammatically correct), which I think makes me a grammar nerd.  While I avoided grammar courses like the plague when I was in college (as much as I had control over, anyway), there are certain faux pas that cause me to see red.  Most of them relate to the grammar lessons I share — particularly the (mis)use of the apostrophe.  But metaphors and similes are topics near and dear to my creative-writing heart.  A figure of speech, a metaphor is a word or phrase symbolically applied to an action or object without using the word like.  For instance, “While I wait for my test results, I am a monkey barrel of nerves.”  Obviously, I am not a real monkey barrel, only a symbolic one.  A simile, on the other hand, is an expression in which two unlike things are explicitly compared using like or as; i.e., “his cantankerous mood makes him prickly like a cactus.”  So if I desire to be more grammatically correct, the quote in the title should probably read: A simile is like a metaphor and a metaphor is a simile.

How would you describe yourself — more like a simile or are you a metaphor?