Analogous

Two years ago – two years! – I did a little series of blog posts exposing bad analogies. Well, I have uncovered the first, in which I attacked a man from off of Smashing Magazine, which is not even a magazine but a website, but there must have been more, right? Was it really quite that short-lived, or did I delete the other ones in horror? If I did censor myself, creating a situation like when Stalin went to the moon, my writing must have been pretty awful, because the aforelinked’s survival displays magnificently just how low the bar is set.

(Smashing Magazine can’t have been too upset about my poorly phrased exposé, cos I was sent a free book, of expensively stitched non-fiction cardboard leaves, that subsequent winter. I still haven’t written a review of it like what I was expected to.)

I mention all this because of a thing that the Washington Post did in 1995:

His fountain pen was so expensive it looked as if someone had grabbed the pope, turned him upside down and started writing with the tip of his big pointy hat.

Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

Via clusterflock, who linked to this blog post, which hubristically claims to have the complete list of analogies, despite having clearly missed the first one quoted above for starters.

As everyone is wont to point out, “bad” is a hasty word. The first one is greatly enriched by dint of “grabbed” looking like “groped”. I do maintain that my long-ago discovery what I made remains far better, obviously. In your face, the Washington Post.