as stupid as — ten comparisons i collected and refused

the comparison structure invites a noun and people fill it badly. as stupid as a rock. as stupid as a bag of hammers. ten of these are sitting in my notes, and not one of them survives the lightest scrutiny. rocks are not stupid. they are just rocks. the comparison is the problem. ten dismantled below.

thursday, 11:34am. i am writing this from the desk on the second floor, which is technically my desk because nobody else wants the corner with the radiator. carla is upstairs in the all-hands, third floor, and that gives me about forty minutes before someone notices the tab i have open is not the spreadsheet. i used the time to type out the ten comparisons that have followed me around since high school and finally do something with them.

the simile is a small machine. you put a noun in. it spits out a verdict on a person. the trouble is the noun is doing work the speaker should be doing. i would like the speaker to do the work.

1. as stupid as, the simile as cliche generator

here is what i think the phrase actually does. it lets the speaker skip the part where you explain what is wrong with the person. you say as stupid as a rock, and the listener nods, and nobody has to define a single thing. the rock did not consent to this and is not present to defend itself.

i would point you to the proper refusal of the word stupid i wrote earlier, where i argued at length that the dictionary is not the boss of me. the simile is the next layer down. the dictionary defines the word; the simile decorates it. both are doing too little for what they are charging.

stefan, who corners me at every wine night with a thesis about everything, told me once that the simile is the lazy cousin of the metaphor. he was holding a glass and the glass was holding most of the wine. i wrote it down. i write a lot of things stefan says down. about half of them are correct, which is a higher batting average than my own.

2. comparison one through five, with my objections

here are the first five, which i have been collecting on the back of envelopes since approximately the year stefan started buying decanters.

one. as stupid as a rock. the rock has been here longer than your grandfather. it has survived weather your apartment cannot survive. when the heating goes out in february, you, the speaker, will be the one calling the landlord. the rock will be fine. the rock has tenure.

two. as stupid as a bag of hammers. a bag of hammers is, structurally, a tool kit. each hammer has a single, well-defined job. the bag is doing inventory management. between the bag and you, only one of you knows where everything is.

three. as stupid as a box of rocks. see above, but in a box, which is also a tool. the box is, in fact, a logistics solution. the box has a function. you, calling people stupid, currently have one function and you are not doing it.

four. as stupid as a doorknob. the doorknob has been operating, without complaint, for decades. it does its one job every time you ask. when was the last time you did your one job every time you were asked. i am aware of how that sounds.

five. as stupid as a brick. the brick is part of the wall keeping you alive. without the brick, the brick’s coworkers, and the mortar that mediates their disputes, you would be outside, in weather, holding a bag of hammers. the brick is the entire reason this conversation is indoors.

3. comparison six through ten, with footnotes

six. as stupid as a post. the post is holding up the porch. without the post, no porch. without porch, no place for stefan to deliver his wine night thesis. the post is providing infrastructure for the very people calling it names.

seven. as stupid as a stump. the stump used to be a tree. it had a longer career than most of us will. now it is a seat for tired people. it is the most dignified retirement i can think of. you should be so lucky.

eight. as stupid as a sack of hair. i have never met a sack of hair. nobody has. the comparison invokes an object that does not exist in order to feel concrete. this is the simile admitting it has nothing.

nine. as stupid as the seventh microwave. this one is mine. the seventh microwave was a martyr to a fork i loved very much. the seventh microwave did everything right until it was asked to do the wrong thing by me. the seventh microwave was not stupid. i am aware of how that sounds.

ten. as stupid as the third yoga mat under my couch from 2023. also mine. the third yoga mat has been waiting under that couch for years and has not complained once. compare that to the most patient person you know. the third yoga mat is winning.

4. why each simile reveals the speaker, not the subject

here is what i started noticing once i had the list in front of me. the comparisons cluster. nobody says as stupid as a clarinet. nobody reaches for as stupid as a vending machine. it is always rocks, hammers, doorknobs, posts. dense, simple, immovable, mute. the speaker is not describing the subject. the speaker is describing what they think dumb looks like, and what they think dumb looks like is whatever does not talk back.

this is the same logic that powers the closure phrase i decommissioned a couple of weeks ago. the simile and the closure phrase are cousins. one ends a thought; the other dresses up an opinion as a comparison. both let the speaker stop thinking. both pretend the thinking already happened.

stefan would call this a category error. stefan would be right, mostly because i am about to say what stefan would say. the category error is loaning a quality (mute, immobile) to a different category (a person you disagree with) and pretending the loan went through. it did not. the bank rejected it. you owe the rock an apology.

5. verdict, the simile is an autobiography in disguise

i collected the ten so i could finally argue with them. now that i have argued with them i can see what they have in common. the speaker who reaches for as stupid as is telling on themselves. they are telling you the limits of their vocabulary. they are telling you what they think a stupid thing looks like, which tells you what they have not bothered to look at closely. the comparison does not describe the target. it describes the room the speaker grew up in and the objects in that room they decided not to think about.

this puts the simile in the same family as the broader stupid-discourse i mapped at the imaginary registrar of dumb domains last month. the registrar i invented is the natural endpoint of this kind of language. once you let the simile do the thinking for you, you may as well outsource the rest of the noun-generation to a website that does not exist. and that, in fact, is what most internet comments are.

the gaslighting playbook i wrote about earlier has its own version of this move, by the way. people defending an indefensible position will reach for as-stupid-as faster than for an actual argument. the comparison becomes the argument. gaslighting works the same way; the move is to act surprised when you push back on the comparison itself. i was just saying, they will say. yes. that is what i was complaining about.

also relevant here: hot take number eight, the long-running pizza argument. pineapple on pizza attracts the simile reflex like nothing else. that is as stupid as putting fruit on bread, somebody says, and the somebody has not noticed that bread is itself a fruit-adjacent grain product and that forrest gump, the only film that ever truly understood the phrase stupid is as stupid does, would tell them to sit down. the simile reflex is not an argument. it is a tic.