The Endless Fascination of Words 5: On Being “Happy as a Clam”

In Australia in the early 1970s there was a resurgence of interest in boxing, an appetite which was fed by a program called TV Ringside. An ex-boxer named Merv Williams provided the ‘expert comments’ at the end of each round and at the conclusion of each fight. Merv was a colourful character, with a great swag of colourful language to draw on :

•       ‘This boy’s tough,’  Merv would say. ‘When he hits you, you stay hit.’

•       ‘He’s   taken   quite   a   lot   of punishment, this boy. The only places he hasn’t been

hit are the roof of the mouth and the soles of the feet.’

Merv’s greatest linguistic strength, however, was his ability to conjure up similes. Some were relatively pedestrian and clichéd, like
‘He’s swinging like a rusty gate’

‘He’s swinging like a barn door In a wind storm’;

But others were rich and original and striking :

•       ‘He’s so tough, If he spat on the concrete It would crack.’

•       ‘He’s got as much chance as a one legged frog In a snake pit.’

But my favourite among Merv’s similes was:

•      ‘He’s a busy fighter. He’s as busy as a one armed wall paper hanger.’

The only person I have ever met who came within a bull’s roar of Merv’s capacity for similes was a fellow by the name of Phil McGulre. I met Phil, in Exmouth, Western Australia; he was travelling around the country with his family. Like the legendary Merv Williams, Phil spouted similes quicker than the Liberals mount leadership challenges.

Conversations with Phil went something like this:

‘Been busy, Phil?’

‘Bat out like a lizard drinking.’

‘Feel like a beer, Phil?’

‘I’ll be in that, mate; like a rat up a drainpipe.’

Phil was never thirsty; he was always dry or parched – parched as a parrot or dry as a nun’s nasty. And when he was happy, he’d say that he was happy as a pig in shit.

As a school child, I had considerable trouble understanding the various ‘figures of speech’; I could never seem to figure them out. We were given names and definitions and exemplars, but In those days I could never work out which was which. There is a continuum which runs from simple comparison, through analogy, and to simile and metaphor.

A teacher made the following distinction :

Apes walk on two feet like men   is a simple comparison.

The boy climbed trees as nimbly as an ape is a simile.

The boy aped his master is a metaphor.

This notion of a continuum Is often evident. 

 

Similes have a long history. The Christian Bible, particularly the more poetical books, contains hundreds of similes. The following appear In the Songs of Solomon:

Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn …Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet… thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks …

Indeed, simile Is very much the stuff of poetry. Similes have to do with resemblance; ‘…the resemblance is in the writer’s mind, not in the nature of the things observed.’

Thus, when Dylan Thomas writes – in his poem of childhood, Fern Hill -

…And happy as the day was long… he was using simile.

Aristotle observed : ‘Similes should be sparingly used in prose, for they are at bottom poetical.’

Ogden Nash would readily concur with this advice, especially the first part; in his poem Very like a whale he observed:

One thing that literature would be greatly the better for

Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor

                                                                                                                      

 Despite these admonitions, writers of prose often use similes. In his autobiographical novel, As  / Went Out One Midsummer’s Morning, Laurie Lee makes full use of similes; for example :

(The town of ) Vigo struck me like an apparition. It seemed to rise from the sea  like  some rust-corroded wreck… Everything looked barnacled… People lay sleeping In doorways, or sprawled on the ground, Iike  bodies washed up by the tide…

 

A little later, he writes: The  drowned  men  rose  from the pavements and stretched their arms … Strange vivid girls went down the street, with hair like coils  of dripping tar…

And later again:

Then as the sun went down It seemed to drag the whole sky with It like shreds of a burning curtain, leaving rags of bright water that went on smoking and smouldering along the many estuaries and around the many Islands.

 

Over recent years I’ve taken an increasing interest in such uses of language. Many writers use similes to powerful and valuable effect. An apt simile is … well … it’s like a well chosen spice: It adds colour and flavour and bite, and enlivens the whole dish.

English teachers, school librarians, and writers will find Happy as a Clam a useful and enjoyable addition to their reference shelves. As the title suggests, the book is an American publication, a fact that is evident throughout the text In the choice of examples. You will find that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Homer, The Bible, Coleridge and Tennyson are all there; but there is a predominance of American writers : Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Oliver Wendel Holmes, Mark Twain … and dozens of writers I’ve never heard of.

As a result, you will find examples like :

Scarce as a Democrat at a Vermont town meeting.

Scarce as a mule at the Kentucky derby.

Scared enough to shit nickels.

Lasted about as bug as a case of beer at a teamster’s picnic.

 

Such parochialism is to be expected, I suppose. The collection is large, and contains all the classics – Including (I was pleased to find) busy as a one armed paper hanger. (Indeed, there was an alternative version, that adds a further dimension to the original: busy as a one armed paper hanger with crabs!)

It was Interesting to discover that Dead as a doornail was coined by Dickens, In A Christmas Carol; and that Easy as rolling off a log was coined by Mark Twain; and that the poet, Robert Southey, coined swearing like a trooper.

Useless as tits on a boar hog  is there; in Australia it would be Useless as  the tits on a bull! Happy as a bastard on Father’s Day is there as well.

Like puns and jokes, similes can lose their bite, and become cliches. Like lettuces left too long on the bench, they become droopy and soggy; they lose their crispness and freshness. What was so impressive about Merv William’s similes was their unexpected quality. His were invariably and strongly visual, like the one legged frog In the snake pit; the image initially shocks you, but you can then savour its aptness.

Many of the similes in Happy as a Clam have become cliches, like: vanished like a puff of smoke; cold as Charity; scarce as hen’s teeth; as easy as pie; fit as a fiddle; safe as the Bank of England; cold as the balls on a brass monkey. But it is no bad thing that even the cliches get a guernsey. In a way, their presence helps to give perspective, so that the newer, fresher similes can be seen against the backdrop of the dull and the cliched.

It’s the sort of book you can dip into, and when you do, you find gems amongst the gravel stones. The following are a few which were new and fresh (to me at least):

W.C. Fields                             As tough as boiled mother-in-law

Truman Capote                       Chattered like a lunatic chimpanzee

Anon                                        Jumpy as a kangaroo

Shakespeare                           Cold as a dead  man’s nose

 

Tolkein                                     Hard and stern as the mountains

Anon                                        About as much fun as a Methodist service

Anon                                        Mean as self righteousness

H. Menken                               It’s as absurd as trying to Instruct a rooster on the laying of eggs.

Busy as a one-legged man In an arse kicking contest.

G.M.McDonald                        Calm as virgins discussing flower arrangements.

Anon                                        Cold as a preacher’s wife on her wedding night.

 

The title itself is Intriguing. With most similes (lie meaning is Immediately apparent. With the best of them, the meaning hits you like a splash of cold water on a hot day; first it shocks, or at least startles you, then you enjoy it.

But Happy as a Clam? Why would a clam be happy? Well, it turns out that the complete phrase is Happy as a clam at high tide. It seems that some clams live out their clammy, sea-shelly lives between the high tide and low tide marks. At low tide, they become vulnerable to birds and to human hunter-gatherers; the latter pump them out of the wet sand in which they take refuge, to make a meal of them (or to make them a meal for other fishy creatures by dangling them on a hook at the end of a line.) So when it’s high tide, they are safe beneath the water.

Happy as a Clam will prove a valuable addition to the libraries of teachers, librarians and writers. It has its faults, but they are quite tolerable faults. My own parochialism leads me to say that the book would have been a whole lot better had It Included some of the rich variety of Australian Idiom. Australian writers and yarn spinners have produced a rich diversity of similes which have become part of our Idiom :

•       tight as a fish’s arsehole

•       built like a brick shlthouse

•       as common as dogshlt and twice as nasty

•       ..so weak, he couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding

•       …It went down like pork at a Jewish wedding.

•       useless as a screen door on a submarine

•       useless as an ashtray on a pushblke

•       busy as a cat watching two rat holes

•       busy as Trirnboli’s travel agent

And then there is the wealth of Idiomatic phrases which further demonstrate an enjoyment of colorful, figurative language; phrases like:

There’s a kangaroo loose in his top paddock.

He’s so weak, he couldn’t knock the dags off a sick canary.

He’s so useless, he couldn’t find a grand piano In a one-roomed house.

He’s so dumb, he couldn’t tell the time, even if the Town Hall clock (ell on him.

He’s two sandwiches short of a picnic.

I hope your chickens turn Into emus and kick your dunny door down!

But nobody’s perfect, and Larry Wright’s collection is a useful one. It would be impossible to make a comprehensive collection of similes, because of the rate at which new similes are being generated. Trying to make a comprehensive collection would be futile; about as futile as a putting a clock in an empty house.