You’d drink out of a gutter if you was thirsty.
Chapter 1 · George Milton
Context
George says this in exasperation after Lennie has plunged his head into the questionable pool water, dismissing George's warnings.
Analysis
The conditional construction collapses hierarchies of cleanliness ('pool,' 'gutter') by making Lennie's discrimination depend solely on appetite, not judgment—the sentence works as a covert taxonomy in which Lennie occupies a class with the appetites but not the discernment of the fully socialized. The hyperbolic 'gutter' draws on urban-poverty imagery foreign to the rural setting, briefly importing a metropolitan register that aligns Lennie with the lowest tier of the human, just below the bear and terrier comparisons that surround him.
How to Use in Essay
Argue that George's exasperated similes function as ongoing cognitive containment of Lennie's difference—this line demonstrates how casual hyperbole performs the daily labor of categorizing Lennie as someone requiring management rather than equal address.