Fellow Logophiles,
[Why does spell-check flag "logophiles" ???]
I've seen variations on this every couple years for some time now, but thought members of this forum would enjoy it (especially if you haven't already seen it).
Anyway, this link was sent to me by my sister. She teaches elementary in Wisconsin. I was literally laughing out loud at some of them, especially #26. Even more so when I started wondering which of the original 100 legs were still intact.
And #35, I thought, was actually quite clever, even though it uses a past tense "was" instead of the subjunctive "were."
http://www.losteyeball.com/index.php/2007/06/19/56-worstbest-analogies-of-high-school-students/
Enjoy.
I enjoyed reading those, but they smack of artificiality (like a slap-stick used for one too many sound effects in a Three Stooges movie).
A bit of digging reveals that most of these come from a Washington Post writing contest called the "Style Invitational."
Yeah, the fact I'd seen variations on it previously shoulda' tipped me off. Sorry 'bout that. Still, whoever wrote that stuff got to the essence of what constitutes a bad (and in a few cases, clever) analogy. It made me laugh. That's why I posted this as "entertainment."
Thanks for doing the research. I use Snopes to check a lot of forwards, but didn't even think about using it on this one.
Extracts from this list have appeared more than once in the opening segment of "Car Talk", and #18 (The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.) is a close paraphrase of a sentence Douglas Adams used in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to describe how spaceships hovered.
Ron Draney said:
...and #18 (The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.) is a close paraphrase of a sentence Douglas Adams used in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to describe how spaceships hovered.
Thanks, Ron - I knew I had read something like that before!