ShmoopTube

00:00

Language can be a great tool for conveying what you want to say. It's

00:07

almost as good as wildly uncoordinated hand gestures. Saw a cute dog on the [ dog on a leash]

00:12

way home from school? Well a certain combination of words can help you

00:15

communicate your findings or feelings to someone else. The word dog might not be

00:20

quite as cute as the actual dog, but well close enough. however sometimes we want [dog on a leash]

00:25

to move beyond the literal meanings of words to spice up our descriptions. We

00:30

happen to have tools at our disposal to do just that, and one of them is called

00:34

simile. Well, similes are a kind of figurative language, the use of words to [tools shown]

00:38

convey a meaning other than a purely literal meaning. Might seem like kind of

00:43

a weird idea. After all stop signs wouldn't be that useful if stop meant to [man holds stop sign]

00:48

go or something totally random like you know, banana.

00:52

well figurative language is mostly useful when we're trying to make [colorful definitions]

00:56

descriptions more vivid. Sure you could say it was cold outside but to really

01:01

hammer home just how cold it was you can use figurative language and say" it was

01:06

so cold outside that my feet felt like blocks of ice". Well we're not literally [snowy scene shown]

01:12

saying that our feet felt like blocks of ice people, after all if they did they'd

01:16

probably be pretty numb anyway, and then fall off. We just mean that it's really

01:20

really cold out which is good for our sentence and even better for our feet. [people walk down the street as it snows]

01:23

similes are a particular kind of figurative language. A simile compares

01:28

one thing to something else using either the word like, or as. Now whether you

01:33

realize it or not when we were talking about how our feet felt like blocks of

01:37

ice we were using a simile. Not only were we comparing the coldness of our feet to

01:43

the coldness of blocks of ice but we also connected these two different ideas [snowy forest shown]

01:47

with the word like. Having ticked both of our boxes we definitely have a simile on

01:52

our hands. We encounter tons of similes in our day to day, life probably without

01:56

even realizing. It ever hear someone say that task is as easy as pie? Well since [busy street shown]

02:02

they're comparing one task to the task of eating pie while using the word as

02:07

they're definitely in simile City, unless they were literally talking about eating

02:11

pie which, for the record it is pretty easy. Stopping is the hard part. [man eats pie]

Full Transcript