Similes Without "Like" or "As"

College freshmen—some of them, at least—can still remember that a simile is a comparison of one thing with another using “like” or “as.” 

Or is it?  What are we to make of this from William Least-Heat Moon in The Road to Quoz:

eastward to the Mississippi lay cotton fields and wetlands, so that for some miles the Ouachita was a kind of zipper between the old steamboating South and the cattleman's West.

Or this from Orhan Pamuk’s Silent House:

…Faruk pulled out a handkerchief the size of a sheet and was mopping his sweat

Or this from David Gessner’s All the Wild that Remains:

All the pretending and the myths were, to his eye, no more real than the false fronts of the towns in Hollywood westerns.

Just to provide a few.

Constructions like these are more frequent than you probably think.

They each offer comparisons without "like" or "as." They aren’t metaphors, because the language—“kind of,” “size of,” and “more real than” indicates comparison. Why are they not labeled similes?  Habit and laziness, in my estimation.

We are not used to questioning the definitions and assumptions of our childhood, it seems.  Yet we want our students to think critically about their childhood assumptions.

I’ve argued elsewhere that we have a lot of such definitional baggage:  topic sentences, transitions, the “writing process,” paragraphs themselves, that we need to re-think before we recapitulate and further propagate these misconceptions. 

They might have value for some age groups as developmental concepts, but by the time students hit a college classroom, we need to bring our teaching closer to the reality of adult writers.

Through the sheer numbers of students they have to teach, high school teachers (I was one) need to keep things relatively simple.  Hence, the five paragraph essay.

While numbers pressure is building in Community and 4-year colleges, the maturity of our students demands that we exhibit the critical thinking that we expect of them.

The watchword of pedagogy when I first started teaching in the 1970s was “relevance.”   While I’m more than a little skeptical of the notion as a guiding light, it might nevertheless be useful to think of debunking inherited oversimplifications in our classrooms as one of the more “relevant” of our responsibilities.

By the way, in the interests of blatant self-promotion, if you are looking for an exercise on similes without “like” or “as,” you can find one in Copia, my workbook on figurative language, linked on the home page of this blog.