There are similes I like so much

IT’S rather fitting that the word “simile” is so close to “smile”. Done well, it’s a figure of speech that can be as pleasing and as unexpected as being served a cold beer in a job interview.

The Wimbledon Men’s (sorry, Establishment types, Gentlemen’s) Final on Sunday was enhanced by the talents of Andy Roddick, a most welcome recruit to the BBC’s commentary team. Aside from providing interesting and perceptive analysis, he proved to be drily entertaining. And he brought the house down when the camera alighted on the great former champion Rod Laver. “When John McEnroe gets around Rod Laver,” said Roddick, “it’s like a 13-year-old girl at a Justin Bieber concert.” It was a delicious moment. The mental image of the one-time Superbrat fawning and simpering over a 76-year-old man, perhaps even throwing his underwear at him, will linger long in the memory.

Like that one, the best similes involve a leap of the imagination, an unexpected comparison that might have been snatched from the heavens. And while Roddick shows promise, the master of the craft has to be the inimitable PG Wodehouse. Consider these for sheer inventiveness and wit:

“He uttered a sound much like a bulldog swallowing a pork chop whose dimensions it has underestimated”

“Her face was shining like the seat of a bus-driver’s trousers.”

“One of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.”

Of course, Wodehouse is Wodehouse; one of a kind. But great similes are everywhere in literature; they can sneak up on you like a cat burglar in ballet pumps and catch you unawares, and they don’t always have to be frivolous or frothy.

Take, for example, Ernest Hemingway, he of the bullfights, big game fishing and other eternal themes. He writes in The Sun Also Rises: “The cafe was like a battleship stripped for action.” And here’s a suitably downbeat one from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables: “There was a quivering in the grass which seemed like the departure of souls.”

Margaret Mitchell crafted a beautiful line in Gone With The Wind (no, not the “I don’t give a damn” one). Describing Scarlett O’Hara’s obsession with Ashley Wilkes, she writes: “The very mystery of him excited her curiosity like a door that had neither lock nor key.”

I don’t know about you, but I’d love to be compared to a closed door. But I’m more your open book type.

‘‘ He uttered a sound much like a bulldog swallowing a pork chop whose dimensions it has underestimated