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Special Cases

A collection of special cases of VA along different dimensions. (Some VA fit into several dimensions.)

Who's claiming it?

  • Her fans in Kerala, in southern India, consider her the Julia Roberts of Malayalam-language films.
  • I like to consider myself the Mae West of rock 'n' roll,'' Ms. Claret, the lead singer of the band Morningwood, said one recent evening.
  • The ''85'' riddim is the work of Dave Kelly, a brilliant producer who could (but wouldn't) claim to be the Dr. Dre of dancehall.
  • Willoughby is sometimes called the Lake Lucerne of North America
  • For El Vez, who bills himself as the Mexican Elvis Presley, there is no better time to celebrate Christmas than after the fact: it gives his show maximum kitsch appeal.

Temporal

  • Mr. Price, who could become the Charles Bronson of guacamole,
  • In physique, personality and production, Ortiz could be the Babe Ruth of the Dominican Republic.
  • Millicent Fenwick was the Katharine Hepburn of politics, said Charles Millard, a former aide and now a Republican New York City Councilman.
  • Keith Haring will be the Peter Max of the future.
  • United who has been hailed as the future Michael Jordan of American soccer.
  • ''She could be the Michael Jordan that women's basketball hasn't yet had,'' said Michele Timms, a guard for Australia and a member of the Phoenix Mercury in the Women's National Basketball Association.

Hypothetical

  • Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?
  • Or if you could, find the Tiger Woods of auto racing: someone who could capture the public's attention,'' he said.
  • Another question is, Who will be the Walt Disney of this era?
  • It felt right that the James Bond of the future would bed anyone,'' said Steven Moffat, the creator of the BBC sitcom ''Coupling'' and the writer of the Captain Jack storyline.
  • ''She could be the Michael Jordan that women's basketball hasn't yet had,'' said Michele Timms, a guard for Australia and a member of the Phoenix Mercury in the Women's National Basketball Association.
  • If Mel Gibson was truly the ''Michelangelo of this generation,'' as one supporter puts it, he would open screenings of ''The Passion'' to viewers other than those he knows will safely embrace it
  • Bruce Ellerstein letter says that if Mel Gibson really were 'Michelangelo of his generation' he would open up screenings of The Passion to viewers other than those he knows will safely embrace it
  • If it is a tax, it's really the Robin Hood of taxes,'' Mr. Schwartz said.
  • There may be no Anthony Powell of wine but Hugh Johnson's prose is very fine.
  • What if there's a Lucy Van Pelt in your sport who's always pulling the glory right out from under you?

More than one

  • I actually consider myself the Stalin of basketball,'' he says, ''the Hitler of basketball, the Pol Pot of basketball.''
  • Guzman is regarded as "the Stalin of Patchogue, the **Idi Amin ** of Long Island
  • Waterman, the Rolls-Royce of pens acquired in 1987, and Papermate, the Chevrolet of pens
  • "New York State is the Cadillac of social services," Mr. Alfonso said. "Other states have Volkswagens."
  • A historian and journalist by training, he has nonetheless striven for years to bear witness to Montana history in fiction, and to become if not the Homer at least the Virgil of generations of Scots who migrated to northwestern Montana before and after it became a state in 1889.
  • A noted French writer has called Leni Riefenstahl "the Plato and Michelangelo of the Leica," and her films assure her an enduring place in cinematic history.
  • London, a professor at New York University and the Conservative Party candidate four years ago, is the seasoned veteran of this road show, a wanderer who is either the Odysseus or Don Quixote of the race, depending how his fortunes fall.
  • "he was the Babe Ruth, the Michael Jordan, the Wayne Gretzky of racing"
  • By the time he stands, slick with sweat and smiling, at the curtain calls, the audience is on its feet and screaming for him as if he is the Mick Jagger or Michael Jordan of Broadway.
  • If Jones was the Michael Jordan of her time, scoring at will, Cain, 33, is the Magic Johnson of hers.
  • "Romario is the Michael Jordan of soccer and Bebeto is the Magic Johnson of soccer," said American defender Paul Caligiuri.
  • Descriptions of Mr. King as "a street Machiavelli, a ghetto Einstein" and of Muhammad Ali as "the Einstein of the Sweet Science" hit the eye like a head-butt, and calling Ali's victory over George Foreman "an epic, a miracle, a revolution" throws rhetoric over the event while illuminating nothing.
  • Some possible portents of doom: a recording that advertises Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as "the 'Star Wars' of symphonic music" and Ludwig van B. himself as the Kurt Cobain of his generation; a famous young virtuoso playing "The Four Seasons" in a music video broadcast on the Weather Channel; arousing anthologies of "Sensual Classics" aimed at heterosexual or homosexual listeners; disks of Arvo Part's music stamped with a descriptive blurb from Michael Stipe of R.E.M. link
  • Bijan wants Jordan to be the Elizabeth Taylor of men's fragrances -- not the now-retired Gabriela Sabatini, whose Gabriela perfume is no Chanel No. link
  • Stephen Colbert Isn't the New Letterman—He's the New Charlie Rose.
  • I wanted the Meryl Streep of toasters, a Hepburn; either would do. (→ "Hepburn" is also a source!?)
  • One result of the change they say is that the nature of the technological oneupsmanship between industry leaders like Intel and Motorola, the Coke and Pepsi of microprocessors, appears to be undergoing a metamorphosis
  • Putting in appearances also are various lions tigers bears birds and fish not to overlook the hosts Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse perhaps the Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd of the cartoon set Jiminy Cricket Freuds superego in the body of an insect and the eminent musicologist Prof Ludwig Von Drake
  • But their showcase wines are meant for the well heeled they want to be the Bordeaux of California not the Beaujolais.
  • The Finger Lakes will become the Champagne of America and Long Island will become the Bordeaux of America said Mr Gifford
  • George Grosz was the Hogarth or Daumier of Weimar Germany
  • If |Istanbul| is the T. E. Lawrence of world capitals, sword unsheathed and racing on horseback toward another clash with history, then Washington is Indiana Jones -- handsome and dashing in its porkpie hat and bullwhip, but only playing a part.

Switch from source to target:

  • He was the Einstein of his time or perhaps we should say that Einstein was the Archimedes of his time

Combined with a condition:

  • If Mr. Moynihan is the Sherlock Holmes of the fiscal story, then Mr. Stockman is at once its Dr. Watson and its Moriarty
  • If Wrigley is the Faneuil Hall Marketplace of ball parks, Comiskey is Paddy's Market.
  • If Wynton Marsalis is the Steven Spielberg of the jazz scene, the alto saxophonist Steve Coleman has a strong claim to being its Stanley Kubrick. link
  • If Ms. Clayburgh was the Julia Roberts of the late 1970's, Gabriel Byrne might be described as the Humphrey Bogart of the early 1990's. link
  • If Toys "R" Us is the Gulliver of toy sellers, then Nintendo is the Godzilla of toys
  • If this was the Zagat's of the air, I would now be the Ruth Reichl of the sky. (?)
  • But if Jordan is the Chuck Yeager of basketball, Julius Erving was Charles Lindbergh and Connie Hawkins was its Wright Brothers. link
  • If Vanilla Ice is the Pat Boone of hip-hop, watering down a vibrant black musical form to make it appeal to a generic pop audience, then G. Love is its Elvis Presley. link
  • If bin Laden is the Robin Hood of jihad,'' the authors write, then Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ''has been its Horatio Alger, and Iraq his field of dreams.'' link

Temporal change:

  • Long considered the David to Microsoft's Goliath, Google is increasingly being thought of as a Goliath itself.
  • Long content with being the BMW of the computer industry, suppying finely crafted machines to a relatively small number of fanatic customers, Apple now wants to become a Ford or Toyota, to move into the mainstream.

A special nested variant where the modifier is also a VA:

  • We might claim for Rand a minor place in art history: an interesting American modulation of European modernist sobriety into bouncy Brooklyn cheerfulness, a Richard Feynman among the Einsteins of design, taking a Klee doodle for a walk on a Mondrian Manhattan grid. link
  • He is a curmudgeon with opinions but no conviction, the Andy Rooney of the Sahara of the Bozart. (?) link

Some form of negation

  • Leach Cross, ''the fighting dentist,'' not Benny Leonard, was the Moses of American Jewish boxing (Sports pages, Dec. 27).
  • He is not a Donald Trump of the Lower East Side.
  • The ''85'' riddim is the work of Dave Kelly, a brilliant producer who could (but wouldn't) claim to be the Dr. Dre of dancehall.
  • ''I am not the Peron of Venezuela, I am the Chavez of Venezuela,'' he has said.
  • The Yankees were not the Marco Polo of baseball.
  • Levine did not come back with the Yao Ming of Chinese baseball because no such person exists.
  • ''He has not been the Michael Jordan in the debates,'' said Representative John R.
  • ''She could be the Michael Jordan that women's basketball hasn't yet had,'' said Michele Timms, a guard for Australia and a member of the Phoenix Mercury in the Women's National Basketball Association.
  • Bijan wants Jordan to be the Elizabeth Taylor of men's fragrances -- not the now-retired Gabriela Sabatini, whose Gabriela perfume is no Chanel No. link
  • Stephen Colbert Isn't the New Letterman — He's the New Charlie Rose.
  • But their showcase wines are meant for the well heeled they want to be the Bordeaux of California not the Beaujolais.

Plural forms

  • CONCERT bands are the Rodney Dangerfields of the music world: they get no respect.
  • We had to win so we wouldn't be the Rodney Dangerfields of the national polls.
  • They do not support the Slobodan Milosevics of the region.
  • That's Jim Wright's party, or ought to be, and trying to seduce the Donald Trumps of this world won't fool them or save it.
  • He and other composers were the Andrew Lloyd-Webbers of their day, writing popular musicals in the hope of box-office success.
  • To some, agreements among nations may seem like hopelessly weak weapons against the Osama bin Ladens of the world, who aren't known for consulting international law before acting.
  • To do that the Apollo bought what Mr Sutton described as the Rolls-Royces of television and recording equipment.

There are also singular/plural changes, e.g. "die Brüder Goncourt der Bundesrepublik = Fritz J. Raddatz".

Including explanations

  • It's the Dolly Parton of cakes: a little bit tacky, but you love her,” said Angie Mosier, a food writer in Atlanta and a board member of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.
  • If not, Odom will become the Randy Moss of the N.B.A., a guy with a lot of question marks who may pay huge dividends.
  • He became the Joyce Carol Oates of pop, incredibly prolific with variable quality.
  • She describes herself as "the Donald Trump of the horse show world," buying and selling horses like so many pieces of real estate, pocketing a profit and never shedding a tear as she watches her property being trucked away.
  • He has since established himself as the Tim McCarver of tennis, the undisputed master of his craft.
  • Mr. Cave is the Elvis of punk, a beloved and semitragic cult icon who for years has been battling the demon of his own image.
  • It is the Madonna of Italian-American literature in that it shows the transition from the Italian immigrant to American citizen like no other book of its genre.''
  • We might claim for Rand a minor place in art history: an interesting American modulation of European modernist sobriety into bouncy Brooklyn cheerfulness, a Richard Feynman among the Einsteins of design, taking a Klee doodle for a walk on a Mondrian Manhattan grid.
  • Sam Schwartz, who writes the Gridlock Sam column for The Daily News, calls him the Beethoven of traffic cops -- in other words, he does not direct traffic so much as conduct it, like a symphony. link
  • He is the Stanley Kubrick of New York chefs -- difficult to get a read on, by most accounts difficult to deal with, but always pointed in a direction that feels as though it will lead straight to the next big thing. link
  • He acts as if he were the Louis Pasteur of poverty, identifying its forms for the first time through the lens of some sociological microscope.
  • Loki is the Bart Simpson of Norse mythology, forever pulling pranks, forever getting caught and forever talking his way out of the consequences.
  • Meanwhile you wait for the tomatoes - the Godot of vegetables
  • The business press has painted Mr McColl as the George Patton of banking - a bluntspoken toughminded leader with a ruthless disregard for tradition at the banks he takes over
  • He gave us hope he was the Dr King of baseball.
  • With her campaign to clean up sex and violence in rock-and-roll imagery Mary Elizabeth Tipper Gore has become the Dr. Moriarity of the heavy metal set.
  • BILLED as the Edison of Japan because he holds the world record of 2360 patents Yoshiro NakaMats created a sensation by showing up with his invention which he told a disbelieving audience can heighten intelligence and even extend life
  • Emil Nolde (1867-1956) was the Darth Vader of modern art: trained in the ways of the Force (Post-Impressionism), but seduced by the forces of the Dark Side (anti-Semitism and Nazism).
  • TIMECOP JeanClaude Van Damme the Energizer Bunny of action stars just never stops trying
  • Since his death in 1866, Chief Seattle has grown in fame and stature to a point where he has become a sort of Abraham Lincoln of American Indians, a gifted orator and visionary leader. link
  • If |Istanbul| is the T. E. Lawrence of world capitals, sword unsheathed and racing on horseback toward another clash with history, then Washington is Indiana Jones -- handsome and dashing in its porkpie hat and bullwhip, but only playing a part.
  • Her [Madonna] appearance at the first Video Music Awards in 1984 was the award-show equivalent of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address — the ideal against which all successors would be measured. [source: I want my MTV, ISBN 978-0452298569)
  • Someone -- often a contemporary composer trying to address the masses -- is always remarking with approval that Mozart tailored his music for particular occasions, that he was just a working stiff, the Burt Bacharach of his day. (NYT 1994/08/28/0708660)
  • Otherwise, he's the George Washington of popular culture: familiar but indistinct, ubiquitous but remote. (NYT 2006/12/03/1808861)
  • "Like the Johnny Cash of watches, it is dressed in all black" source

Here, the source (!) is explained:

  • In a March 28 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, she warned Mr. Spielberg that he could ''go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games,'' a reference to a German filmmaker who made Nazi propaganda films.
  • Hanns Weinberg was the Joseph Duveen of antique porcelain,'' said Ms. Beiny, comparing her grandfather to the flamboyant early-20th-century dealer who sold old master paintings to American tycoons.

Additional adjectives

  • next: ''I think Jason Giambi will be the next Babe Ruth of New York,'' Rodriguez said.
  • future: United who has been hailed as the future Michael Jordan of American soccer.
  • would-be: Suppose you are a would-be Michael Jordan of my trade, consulting?
  • undisputed: Over the last 24 years, he has emerged as the undisputed Don Quixote of the State Legislature, a man willing to rail endlessly about the political misdeeds of the majority even when absolutely nobody was listening.
  • abused pint-size: He has already had an encounter with two of the students -- the troubled basketball star Lester Dewitt (Usher Raymond) and Ziggy Malone (Robert Ri'chard ), the abused pint-size Michelangelo of the Lincoln High cockloft by the time Mr.
  • game, albeit hipper: If Klensch is the Cronkite of the rag trade, Crawford is a game, albeit hipper, Kathie Lee
  • sad-eyed: An accident perhaps but one that has an uncanny antecedent he believes: "The same thing that happened to me happened to Menasha Skulnik" Mr Mason said referring to the sad-eyed Charlie Chaplin of the Yiddish theater
  • upscale: Her role as a kind of upscale Johnny Appleseed of the arts has, for the moment at least, effectively transcended the arguments about obscenity that all but paralyzed the arts agency during most of the Bush years.

see also syntactic variations and national adjectives below

Recursion

  • Barack Obama: »There is a reason you call someone the Michael Jordan of [something]. They know what you're talking about because Michael Jordan is the Michael Jordan of greatness. He is the definition of somebody so good at what they do that everybody recognizes it. That's pretty rare.« (Washington Post, 22.11.2016)

Typical modifiers

  • temporal: "today", "his day", "her day", "his time", "her time", "his generation", "her generation", "the future", "the 70s", ...
  • geographical: continents, countries, cities, mountains ("Himalayas", "Hudson Valley"), rivers ("Hudson"), ...
  • sports: "tennis", "baseball", "basketball", "golf", ...
  • culture: "ballet", "the art world", "jazz", "fashion", ...

Special modifiers

  • more than one: The top-hatted statue will utter not a word about the American sucker, for the simple reason that Barnum - the Michelangelo of buncombe, hokum, hoopla and ballyhoo - was himself the victim of a hoax.
  • longest so far: And while he modestly demurs, Mr. Barker is widely regarded as the Bob Fosse of the carefully choreographed event that consumes Midtown Manhattan with tin whistles, step dancers and some two million spectators on that invariably brisk March 17 morning. link

Types of targets

  • humans: Mr. Price, who could become the Charles Bronson of guacamole,
  • groups: Aerosmith, the Dorian Gray of rock bands
  • organisations: Starbucks Coffee, the General Motors of espresso
  • animals:
    • Sea Hero is the Bobo Holloman of racing
    • IF there is one thing that unites all racing people, it is the fervent prayer that their stagnant industry will develop a great four-legged hope, a Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky of the equine set.
  • objects: Waterman, the Rolls-Royce of pens acquired in 1987, and Papermate, the Chevrolet of pens
  • locations: "New York State is the Cadillac of social services," Mr. Alfonso said. "Other states have Volkswagens."
  • taxes: If it is a tax, it's really the Robin Hood of taxes,'' Mr. Schwartz said.
  • states: All we need is a bad tie and goggle eyes and we are the Rodney Dangerfield of states.'' (Nevada)

Types of sources

  • humans: Mr. Price, who could become the Charles Bronson of guacamole,
  • organisations: Vaz Auto Works, the General Motors of Russia
  • fictional characters: Mike Wallace, the Godzilla of the tube
  • objects: Waterman, the Rolls-Royce of pens acquired in 1987, and Papermate, the Chevrolet of pens
  • locations: Schonbrunn Castle, the Versailles of the Hapsburgs
  • poems: Carter had become the Ancient Mariner of the Mets carrying the albatross around his neck trying to hit his 300th home run during this becalmed and sultry summer

Change of Gender

  • Bijan wants Jordan to be the Elizabeth Taylor of men's fragrances -- not the now-retired Gabriela Sabatini, whose Gabriela perfume is no Chanel No. link

Change of Name

  • As Joe Peters a visiting school administrator from Connecticut who was strolling on Broadway saw it Hes going to learn all our tricks of capitalism and become the Donald Trumpski of the Soviet Union Sour Note in the Sky

Syntactic variations

  • the ... equivalent of: New South Wales, the Georgian equivalent of deep space
  • the ... answer to: Miss Westwood, who helped revive the British fashion scene in the early 1980's, is back after a few seasons' absence with outrageous clothes that her fans are calling the /British/ answer to those of Christian Lacroix in Paris.
  • the ... version of: Sassy, the United States version of Dolly
  • the ... sort of: George Romney, the Middle America sort of guy
  • the ..., the ..., the ... of: Joe Sparks might very well end up being the Dali, the Truffaut, the Coppola of this industry
  • my version of the ... of ...: I was basically my version of the Michael Scott of car salesman which is a total contrast to the way David runs his stores.
  • the new ...: As far as selling sneakers is concerned, Cleveland guard LeBRON JAMES is the new Michael Jordan.
  • new: Leslie Carter is apparently the new Marie Osmond
  • might turn out to be: He said Xerox and other companies had high hopes for Internet businesses but he also said that some companies were worried that the Internet might turn out to be the CB radio of the 1990s.
  • pioneers: 'They were the great Johnny Appleseed pioneers of punk rock,'' said Andy Schwartz, the former editor of New York Rocker, which chronicled the scene while it happened.
  • a ... in: |Conor Oberst,| a 20-year-old Omaha native, is a Mozart in this world, a prolific recording artist since age 14.; Despite his reservations, Evans, for example, calls |her| a ''Paul Revere in skirts, running through the airline industry's village of complacency.''
  • a ... figure in/of/among: |Mel Fisher,| a former chicken farmer who became a Horatio Alger figure among undersea treasure hunters, died on Saturday at his home in Key West, Fla.
  • modifier before source: You see, being a designer has never been enough for a champion of peace, a patron of the arts, a bon vivant, a world conqueror of sorts, fashion's Johnny Appleseed spreading Pierre Cardin seeds all over the world.

National Adjectives

  • For those who stay inside, 6:30 A.M. brings a Chinese Jane Fonda on state television, leading a studio audience and home viewers in exercises based on disco steps, to the accompaniment of Chinese disco music.
  • For El Vez, who bills himself as the Mexican Elvis Presley, there is no better time to celebrate Christmas than after the fact: it gives his show maximum kitsch appeal.
  • Mr. Farmanara's sense of humor flows into this three-part story about Bahman, a filmmaker coming to terms with his own mortality; he could be an Iranian Woody Allen using his own life for scoring laughs off himself.
  • ''Harumi Kurihara is just one of several women who you might call 'the Japanese Martha Stewart.'

Misc

  • Even [Michael] Jordan isn't always Jordan. The last time he retired, to play baseball, the Chicago Bulls' owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, called him the Babe Ruth of basketball.

  • And the anticipated return of Jordan, whom the Bulls' coach, Phil Jackson, called ''the Michelangelo'' of basketball, created mere frenzy in Chicago.

  • "Some people say Claire Shulman is the Golda Meir of Queens. [...] I say Golda Meir was the Claire Shulman of Israel."

  • 'I'm like David fighting the Goliath of the beauty industry,'' she said in a recent interview.

  • Climbing harnesses are the new Guy Fawkes mask of Portland protest

  • witzig/sarkastisch:

    • Norwegen ist das Schweden Skandinaviens.
    • Ich bin der deutsche Rainald Götz.
    • I have myself heard the Dutch described as the Chinese of Europe.

  • reflecting on (Michael Jordan) VA:

    • Long list of people and some nonhumans are acclaimed as the Michael Jordans of their fields, including billiards champion Sang Chun Lee, speller Jody-Anne Maxwell, lacrosse player Gary Gait, rodeo rider Ty Murray and rodeo bull Bodacious; photos (S)
    • One frequent fallback, which comes in handy when covering esoteric events, is to describe someone as ''the Michael Jordan'' of his or her sport.

No VA?

  • He [Lou Reed] is to New York what James Joyce was to Dublin. (ISBN 978-0060776756)
    • Could also be written as "Lou Reed is the James Joyce of New York" but that lacks a bit the temporal ("was") aspect and the reference to Dublin.