Will still talk of that which runs most in their head.”
There is another class of similes scarcely as pertinent, as, for instance: straight as a ram’s horn; it will melt in your mouth like a red-hot brickbat; talk to him like a Dutch uncle; smiling as a basket of chips; odd as Dick’s hatband; happy as a clam at high water; quicker than you can say Jack Robinson; like all possessed; like fury; like blazes; like all natur’; like all sixty; as quick as anything; mad as hops; mad as Halifax; sleep like a top; run like thunder; deader than a door-nail. Thunder is a very accommodating word. A person may be told to go to thunder, or may be thundering proud, or thundering sensible, or thundering good-looking, or thundering smart, or thundering mean, or thundering anything; and anything may be likened to thunder. The epitaph quoted from a tombstone in Vermont over a man’s two wives was quite proper, but was rendered ludicrous by this common use of the word:
“This double call is loud to all,
Let none surprise or wonder;
But to the youth it speaks a truth
In accents loud as thunder.”
“Dead as a door-nail” would not seem to be very expressive, and yet it has long been used. In “Henry IV.” we read the following dialogue:
“Falstaff.—What! is the old king dead?
Pistol.—As nail in door.”
Dickens, in his “Christmas Carol,” wonders why Scrooge should be dead as a door-nail rather than any other kind of nail. Probably the explanation is in the fact that proverbs are often pointed by alliteration, and that door-nail gratifies this conceit while any other nail would not.