Subjects are abstract when we do not have direct access to them through our senses. Abstract subjects include intangible qualities of things, beliefs, and values. People may see subjects like justice or courage in different ways. We may agree that the object before us is a Mustang convertible—here are its lights, its fenders, its hood ornament. But what are the physical features of fairness or honor? As we talk about such subjects, we may discover that speakers and listeners assign different meanings to them.
In order to share our perceptions, we must fall back on the three R’s of language techniques: Relationship, Replacement, and Representation.
One way to handle an abstraction is to show a relationship between the subject and some concrete object of comparison. When words such as like or as are used to connect the abstract and the concrete, or the obscure and the well-known, the comparison is called a simile. Remember Scott Champlin’s words, “a force that spun me around like a twisted yo-yo at the end of a string”? Most of us, we hope will never be hit by a tracer bullet while parachuting, but helped by the simile, we can imagine the scene.
Aristotle once warned that what you select for comparison can either enhance or diminish a subject. An ill-advised simile can make your subject seem trivial or repulsive and make you seem tasteless. Some critics thought President Clinton was ineffective when he suggested that stalling action on health care reform “will make it just like a hangnail or an ingrown toenail. It’s just going to get worse.”0 When they work well, however, similes do important work in controversies. Thus one speaker complained that the government’s demand that Microsoft add Netscape Navigator to its Windows 98 operating system was “like forcing Coca-Cola to add two cans of Pepsi to each six-pack of Coke.” At one point the simile played a major role in Microsoft’s case in that controversy.

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