Characteristics, National
Characteristics, National
- America is more a ratatouille than a melting pot —Ken Holm, New York Times Magazine, October 12, 1986
The food image is particularly appropriate to Holm’s article about mixing Eastern and Western ingredients when cooking.
- America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for —E. M. Forster
- As American as a catcher’s mit —George Jean Nathan
- As American as a Norman Rockwell painting —Max Shulman
- As American as a sawed-off shotgun —Dorothy Parker about Dashiell Hammett, New Yorker, April 15, 1931
- As American as cheesecake —Samuel Yellen
- As American as corn on the cob —Anon
- As American as jazz —Anon
- As American as shopping malls —Anon
- As American as the dream of being a millionaire —Anon
- As American as the two-car garage —Anon
- As British as roast beef —Anon
- As English as tea and scones —Elyse Sommer
The variations to this are virtually limitless; to cite just a few: “As English as the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace,” “English as clotted cream,” “As English as Picadilly,” “As English as Trafalgar Square.”
- As in sex, the Japanese do not care for extended encounters: “in and out” is their motto in love and war —James Kirkup
- Bullied and ordered about, the Englishman obeys like a sheep, evades like a knave, or tries to murder his oppressor —George Bernard Shaw
- Countries are like fruit; the worms are always inside —Jean Giradoux
- Energy in a nation is like sap in a tree, it rises from the bottom up —Woodrow Wilson, October 28, 1912 speech
- Frenchmen are like grains of gunpowder, each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- A French woman dips into love like a duck into water,’tis but a shake of the feathers and wag of the tail and all is well again; but an English woman is like a heedless swan venturing into a pool who gets drowned —Washington Irving
- Friendship in France as impossible to be attained as orange-trees on the mountains of Scotland —Lady Mary Wortley Montague letter to Lady Pomfret, July 12, 1744
- (In America … people claim and disown ‘identities’) as easily as they slap on bumper stickers —Philip Roth
- Nations, like individuals, have to limit their objectives or take the consequences —James Reston
- Nations, like men, die by imperceptible disorders —Jean Giraudoux
- Nations, like men, have their infancy —Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke
- A quiet Irishman is about as harmless as a powder magazine built over a match factory —James Dunne
- Soviet action is like a riddle wrapped inside an enigma —Winston Churchill
- The wheels of American foreign relations turn like the wheels of an ox cart —Clive Cussler
See Also: POLITICS
Similes Dictionary, 1st Edition. © 1988 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.