Psychedelic Slippers

"Anything" is not a simile, neither a metaphor... When we use a sentence of the form  'A verb like B' then B is often used to site an example to support the verb, or to indicate the degree of a verb more like an adverb e.g. ate like a pig, grew like a giant. Anything is not an example of anything. So phrases like 'Drove like anything', 'Ate like anything', 'Grew like anything' do not make sense. When people use such phrases anything is used in place of something voracious, fast or rapid. According to dictionary.com Anything means 1) something no matter what, 2) any how or in any degree... [1] Lets take the last phrase, 'grew like anything'. If we replace anything by any how, it will read 'grew like something no matter what', or 'grew like any how', which would mean grew in any manner (if we ignore the like), or rather would imply in a disorderly manner (if we talk about speed, we would expect the growth to altern