The critic’s racket ordinarily is to damn with faint praise or to praise with faint damns. It is only now and then that a critic praises without reservation. Today, uncharacteristically, a mood of unconditional benignity has fallen upon me. It won’t last long.

Not long ago, William Booth of The Washington Post visited the back lot of Universal Studios in Los Angeles. His assignment was to have a look at Wisteria Lane, home of the “Desperate Wives” of Sunday night soap opera. He found a suburban world, both real and unreal. The neighborhood was “as busy as a yard sale.”

What makes a perfect simile? We have discussed this off and on for years. A perfect simile must be packed as tightly as the inside of a watch. This is an area in which professor William Strunk’s dictum applies absolutely: One of his many sound rules of English composition was to Omit Needless Words! He lectured to his students at Cornell:

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all of his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

Booth might have written about a neighborhood “as busy a yard sale at Hollywood and Vine with Barbra Streisand handling the customers’ credit cards.” Such padding would not have improved the simile. It would have been fat on the pork chop – so many needless words to be trimmed away!

Another writer for The Washington Post, Hank Stevens, covered a typical Washington story. A philanthropist had made a gift to the National Museum of American History. A yawner. She had given the museum a 1965 Ford Mustang, dent-free but giving off an aura of the used and cherished. “It is eyeshadow blue.”

The perfect simile must be compact, and it must compare a Defined Subject A to a Familiar Object B. The Mustang “is eyeshadow blue.” The car, the cosmetic, the color.

Four years ago, a bichon frise, name of J.R., won best of show at the Westminster Dog Show. The New York Times’ Douglas Martin wrote about the winner:

“J.R. is a dazzlingly white, 14-pound, intensely furry powder puff with sparkling black-currant eyes. But his attitude is his most distinguishing characteristic. When he won at Westminster, J.R. celebrated by jumping inside the sterling bowl he had just been presented, raising his front paws and beating them in the air like Rocky, his signature gesture. The next morning he cranked the charm to panda level as he made the rounds of the morning talk shows.”

What were Martin’s elements? Look at them: a powder puff, two black currants, a sterling silver bowl, Rocky the boxer, and charm at the “panda level.”

In fashioning similes and metaphors, the writer’s trick is to stick with familiar elements and then to pack them into a sentence as tightly as an egg in its shell. We must look intently and read insatiably. In time, with luck and hard work, we too may look at a champion dog and see a powder puff.

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.

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