Like Sam, Virgil likes to use figures of speech―the language of comparison―to make his ideas clearer and more interesting. When a rat fleeing the vacant lot runs up the leg of a drug dealer, Virgil says that the guy "shook his leg like his toe was being electrocuted." That's much easier to imagine than if Virgil simply said the dealer was shaking his leg "really hard." (It's also more entertaining.)

There's something a little different about the way Virgil uses figures of speech, compared to the way Sam does. While Sam is very careful to explain his comparisons exactly, Virgil tends to exaggerate. A figure of speech that stretches the truth to create an effect, such as humor, is called hyperbole. Here are some other examples of hyperbole from Virgil's chapter.

Virgil says his father "had a two-foot-wide smile on his face."

When Virgil starts to dig his father's garden, he says the ground is so hard that his shovel "bounced off it like a pogo-stick."

Virgil says that strict Miss Fleck was so proper in her speech that she "pronounced every letter in every word."

According to Virgil, trying to grow lettuce was like "having a new baby in the family." And not an easy baby, either―"the minute it came up, it started to wilt."