The Pudding: An analysis of 200,000 similes from popular fiction. Similes are all around us. But, if you haven’t considered this figure of speech since grade school, here’s a refresher: similes compare a shared quality of two things, often using “like” or “as.” I pulled every simile in the form “as ___ as ___” from tens of thousands of fiction books for the top 500 most common adjectives.

See also The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows – The word sadness originally meant fullness,” to be filled to the brim with some intensity of experience. It’s not about despair, or distraction, or controlling how you’re supposed to feel, it’s about awareness. Setting the focus to infinity and taking it all in, joy and grief all at once; feeling the world as it is, the word as it could be. The unknown and the unknowable, closeness and distance and trust, and the passage of time. And all the others around you who are each going through the same thing. The Romans called it lacrimae rerum, the “tears of things.” We call them obscure sorrows.