Simile #13
“He’s as sick as a horse”
I can’t give this one a particular reference, although I can tell you Georgette Heyer abuses it shamelessly. I loved it the first time I read it, and I guess it’s a reminder that fresh similes always beat cliched ones. I grew up with the expression ‘sick as a dog’, and heard it so often, it lost all meaning before I even stopped to think what that meaning might be. I never once got a mental image of a sick dog. But a horse? Love it.
And the strange thing is, I think of a horse that is fed up, or sick with envy, rather than actually ill.
