Similepedia is a new wiki site that helps a literature-loving community collect, categorize and comment on similes from prose, poetry, essays and other works. These turns of phrase help us derive deeper meaning, reveal a hidden truth. They are thrilling, epic, artful, elegant and awkward. We are like botanists, collecting exotic samples and pinning them to our corkboard. (See below for how to add and tag similes.)
Search similes:
Similepedia has been seeded with similes from a range of authors, from Steinbeck to Hemingway, Faulkner, Homer, Cormac McCarthy, T. Coraghessan Boyle and Thomas McGuane. The community will continue to add to this repository.
Some of this exotica:
“If I begin to feel daunted I’ll go off by myself. I’m like a cat that way.” (Hemingway: “The Sun Also Rises”)
“I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.” (Faulkner: “As I Lay Dying”)
“His bony hand dug its way like a squirrel into his overall pocket, brought out a black, bitten plug of tobacco.” (Steinbeck: “East of Eden”)
“…the waitress had given her the interplanetary stare and she felt like some animal on a leash, but she didn’t care: this was her life and there was nothing she could do about it.” (Boyle: “Talk Talk”)
“Plunging ahead, he broke the Trojans, valorous as a boar in mountain land who scatters dogs and men with ease, wheeling upon them in a glade.” (Homer: “The Iliad”)
“… You ought to hear him describe heaven. It sounds like Filene’s department store.” (McGuane: “Gallatin Canyon”)
The How-To: The idea for Similepedia began aptly enough with a book and a pen. At every simile, a dot was placed in the page margin and then transcribed into Word and then posted on this site.
When you post a simile or a collection of similes, the following data is also registered to keep the material as useful as possible:
- Main Title: The cover title (no quotes but complete title)
- Secondary Title: If any. Applies to short stories and poetry
- Complete name of author: Format is Last Name, First Middle Initial
- First Published: First copyright year. May be different than edition year.
- Publisher Used for Citing: The publisher of this particular edition
- Type: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry, Play, Essay etc.
- Period: Century of first copyright
The form can be used to list multiple similes from the same work. Simply paste into the form similes separated by a single carriage return (one paragraph space). Similepedia will store each simile separately and apply the title and author information to them all.
To tag individual similes: Users can further categorize similes by using the tag form found on individual simile pages. Each simile can be tagged any number of times: This simile is about “the body,” this one about “sincerity,” this one about the “sea.”
And finally the community can add its thoughts to the Commentary section by adding pages using the PmWiki simple interface. Please refer to the documentation index. The basic editing describes how to create pages in PmWiki and you can practice editing in the wiki sandbox.
More information about PmWiki is available at http://www.pmwiki.org .
And a special shout-out to Eclectic Tech at http://www.eclectictech.net, the technology designers of Similepedia.