A. As defined in our glossary, an analogy is "reasoning or arguing from parallel cases." Put another way, an analogy is a comparison between two different things in order to highlight some point of similarity.
In the following example, the Governor of the Bank of England turns to the world of professional soccer to explain monetary policy in the United Kingdom:
The "great Argentine footballer, Diego Maradona, is not usually associated with the theory of monetary policy," Mervyn King explained to an audience in the City of London two years ago. But the player's performance for Argentina against England in the 1986 World Cup perfectly summarized modern central banking, the Bank of England's sport-loving governor added.
Maradona's infamous "hand of God" goal, which should have been disallowed, reflected old-fashioned central banking, Mr King said. It was full of mystique and "he was lucky to get away with it." But the second goal, where Maradona beat five players before scoring, even though he ran in a straight line, was an example of modern practice. "How can you beat five players by running in a straight line? The answer is that the English defenders reacted to what they expected Maradona to do. . . . Monetary policy works in a similar way. Market interest rates react to what the central bank is expected to do."
(Chris Giles, "Alone Among Governors," Financial Times, September 8-9, 2007)
Note that an analogy is not quite the same as a metaphor. As Bradford Stull observes in The Elements of Figurative Language (Longman, 2002), the analogy "is a figure of language that expresses a set of like relationships among two sets of terms. In essence, the analogy does not claim total identification, which is the property of the metaphor. It claims a similarity of relationships."
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