Definition:
In rhetoric, reasoning or explaining from parallel cases. Adjective: analogous.
A simile is an expressed analogy; a metaphor is an implied one.
See also:
- Analogy (Composition)
- 30 Writing Topics: Analogies
- What Is an Analogy?
- Analogies in David Simon's "Homicide"
- "The Battle of the Ants," by Henry David Thoreau
- Benchley's "Advice to Writers"
- False Analogy
- What Is Writing Like? (Explaining the Writing Experience Through Similes and Metaphors)
Etymology:
From the Greek "proportion"Examples and Observations:
- "I am to dancing what Roseanne is to singing and Donald Duck to motivational speeches. I am as graceful as a refrigerator falling down a flight of stairs."
(Leonard Pitts, "Curse of Rhythm Impairment." Miami Herald, Sep. 28, 2009) - "If you want my final opinion on the mystery of life and all that, I can give it to you in a nutshell. The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe."
(Peter De Vries, Let Me Count the Ways. Little Brown, 1965) - "Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo."
(Don Marquis) - "They crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water."
(George Orwell, "A Hanging," 1931) - "Harrison Ford is like one of those sports cars that advertise acceleration from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in three or four seconds. He can go from slightly broody inaction to ferocious reaction in approximately the same time span. And he handles the tight turns and corkscrew twists of a suspense story without losing his balance or leaving skid marks on the film. But maybe the best and most interesting thing about him is that he doesn't look particularly sleek, quick, or powerful; until something or somebody causes him to gun his engine, he projects the seemly aura of the family sedan."
(Richard Schickel, review of Patriot Games in Time magazine) - "If I had not agreed to review this book, I would have stopped after five pages. After 600, I felt as if I were inside a bass drum banged on by a clown."
(Richard Brookhiser, "Land Grab." The New York Times, Aug. 12, 2007) - "One good analogy is worth three hours discussion."
(Dudley Field Malone) - "[T]he college/university situation in the United States has finally wound up in the position of the Church in the late Middle Ages, which sold people indulgences (read diplomas) so that they could get into heaven (read a well-paying job). This has become the rule at thousands of institutions of higher education, where a grade of B is now considered average (or slightly below), and where A's are given out almost automatically so as not to threaten student enrollments, on which institutional funds depend."
(Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture. W.W. Norton, 2000) - "That novels should be made of words, and merely words, is shocking, really. It's as though you had discovered that your wife were made of rubber: the bliss of all those years . . . from sponge."
(William H. Gass, "The Medium of Fiction," in Fiction and the Figures of Life. David R. Godine, 1979) - "MTV is to music as KFC is to chicken."
(Lewis Black) - "Memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup."
(Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris, 1949) - Using an Analogy to Explain Koans
"I'll give you the whole koan:A monk asked Chao-Chou, 'What is the meaning of Bodhidarma's coming from the West?'
. . . Koans are mind-cracking, often irritating, seemingless pointless riddles or dialogues, which if contemplated in the right spirit will help students crack through the confines of their own limited ability to see the world as it is and become enlightened, often like a bolt out of the blue.
Chao-Chou said, 'The oak tree is in the courtyard.'
"Koans are often structured like a classic comedy routine. A student (let's use, for this example, Lou Costello) asks the teacher (Bud Abbott, then) a thoughtful question (the setup), to which the teacher responds with a seemingly unrelated or paradoxical answer (the punch line). Sometimes the teacher drives the point home with a sharp crack of his kotsu staff on the student's back or the top of his head (the sight gag), which causes the student to fall (the pratfall) and perhaps think more deeply not only about the answer but about the question."
(Kevin Murphy, A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey. HarperCollins, 2002)
Pronunciation: ah-NALL-ah-gee
