Category Archives: simile

Simile (si’-mi-lee): An explicit comparison, often (but not necessarily) employing “like” or “as.”

Higher education in the 21st century at many colleges and universities does not successfully prepare its so-called liberally educated students to negotiate life’s vicissitudes; to negotiate uncertainties and strife with humane voices speaking in the light. Rather, from the “safe spaces” where they reside, they learn how to “take offense,” and how to willy nilly level charges that are always taken seriously, and always will be heard.

Like latter-day nazis, like blood-hungry wolves, they have forged their brutish howling voices into pointed blades of fear, turning “judicial hearings” into monologues where cowering judges have only to decide how, and how much, to punish whomever “some students” may anonymously deride.

Somewhere, this is the culture of academic residential life, where there are no consequences for telling lies. In this community of Kafka houses after every trial, when the gavel grants another win to their revengeful pride, “some students” have been known laugh out loud, smoke a joint, drink a couple of drinks, and piss on the wall of the stone prophylactic euphemistically called “residence hall.”

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Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).