What are some examples of an analogy?

Question

What are some examples of an analogy?

Answer 1

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Answer 2

As a reservoir stores water, the mind stores knowledge.

Answer 3

To my way of thinking, Aesop's fables are the cream of the crop. When you say that someone is a "dog in a manger" you mean that the person is denying someone something that is of no use to them self. In this case,a dog keeping a cow from its fodder. Or sour grapes.  Someone criticizing something that they wanted but couldn't get. Like the fox who couldn't reach up to the grapes and then told everyone that they were sour.

Aesop observed human nature and wrote allegorical and analogical tales to make us confront ourselves.

Answer 4

http://www.answers.com/analogy

Literary Dictionary: analogy

analogy, illustration of an idea by means of a more familiar idea that is similar or parallel to it in some significant features, and thus said to be analogous to it. Analogies are often presented in the form of an extended simile, as in Blake's aphorism: ‘As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.’ In literary history, an analogue is another story or plot which is parallel or similar in some way to the story under discussion.

Philosophy Dictionary: analogy

A respect in which one thing is similar to another. The analogical extension of terms is the way in which a term covers similar things: people, bottles, and rivers have mouths. Shops, boxes, verdicts, ports, strings of a violin, questions, roads, and books may all be open, but in analogical senses. Analogy butts upon literal meaning, but also upon metaphor, and thus forms a perplexing phenomenon in the philosophy of language (see also rulefollowing). Arguing by analogy is arguing that since things are alike in some ways, they will probably be alike in others. Its famous uses in philosophy include the argument to design and the argument by analogy to the existence of other minds: if you behave like me, and I have such and such mental states when I so behave, then by analogy you probably do so too. But: ‘How can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?’ (Wittgenstein). In medieval philosophy an important question was whether we can make statements about God only by analogy.

Archaeology Dictionary: analogy

A process of reasoning whereby two entities or processes that share some similarities are assumed to share many others. Alison Wylie has usefully defined two kinds of analogy in archaeological reasoning: formal analogy is based on a straightforward comparison of some aspect of form, or observable characteristics, which can be transferred from one case to another; relational analogy is based on understanding the causal relationships between the variables that can be observed.

Columbia Encyclopedia: analogy,

in biology, the similarities in function, but differences in evolutionary origin, of body structures in different organisms. For example, the wing of a bird is analogous to the wing of an insect, since both are used for flight. However, there is no common ancestral origin in the evolution of these structures: While the wings of birds are modified skeletal forelimbs, insect wings are extensions of the body wall. Although insects and birds do have a very remote common ancestry (more than 600 million years ago), the wings of the two groups evolved after their ancestries had separated.

Law Encyclopedia: Analogy

The inference that two or more things that are similar to each other in some respects are also similar in other respects.

An analogy denotes that similarity exists in some characteristics of things that are otherwise not alike.

In a legal argument, an analogy may be used when there is no precedent (prior case law close in facts and legal principles) in point. Reasoning by analogy involves referring to a case that concerns unrelated subject matter but is governed by the same general principles and applying those principles to the case at hand.

Grammar Dictionary: analogy

A comparison of two different things that are alike in some way (see metaphor and simile). An analogy attributed to Samuel Johnson is: “Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.”

Poetry Glossary: Analogy

An agreement or similarity in some particulars between things otherwise different; sleep and death, for example, are analogous in that they both share a lack of animation and a recumbent posture.

Rhetoric

An analogy can be a spoken or textual comparison between two words (or sets of words) to highlight some form of semantic similarity between them. Such analogies can be used to strengthen political and philosophical arguments, even when the semantic similarity is weak or non-existent (if crafted carefully for the audience).

Linguistics

An analogy can be the linguistic process that reduces word forms perceived as irregular by remaking them in the shape of more common forms that are governed by rules. For example, the English verb help once had the preterite holp and the past participle holpen. These obsolete forms have been discarded and replaced by helped by the power of analogy (or by widened application of the productive Verb-ed rule.) However, irregular forms can sometimes be created by analogy; one example is the American English past tense form of dive: dove, formed on analogy with words such as drive: drove.

Neologisms can also be formed by analogy with existing words. A good example is software, formed by analogy with hardware; other analogous neologisms such as firmware and vaporware have followed. Another example is the humorous term underwhelm, formed by analogy with overwhelm.

Analogy is often presented as an alternative mechanism to generative rules for explaining productive formation of structures such as words. Others argue that in fact they are the same mechanism, that rules are analogies that have become entrenched as standard parts of the linguistic system, whereas clearer cases of analogy have simply not (yet) done so (e.g. Langacker 1987.445-447). This view has obvious resonances with the current views of analogy in cognitive science which are discussed above.

Science

Analogs are often used in theoretical and applied sciences in the form of models or simulations which can be considered as strong analogies. Other much weaker analogies assist in understanding and describing functional behaviours of similar systems. For instance, an analogy commonly used in electronics textbooks compares electical circuits to hydraulics.