Stretching an analogy too far is like stretching a rubber band too far - eventually it breaks, and you end up with pencils or whatever all over the place, and very likely a painful red mark on your fingers.
Is that not more of a simile? This is not a rhetorical question. The difference between metaphors, similes, and analogies has always troubled me. It's like the use of the semicolon...
I think "analogy" is a more general term that can apply to any sort of explication-by-comparison.
In school I was taught that a simile used "like" or "as", and metaphor didn't; "Parliament is like a pregnant hamster" is a simile, and "Parliament is a pregnant hamster" is a metaphor. As with many things I was taught in school, I suspect this is largely bogus and/or irrelevant.
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In school I was taught that a simile used "like" or "as", and metaphor didn't; "Parliament is like a pregnant hamster" is a simile, and "Parliament is a pregnant hamster" is a metaphor. As with many things I was taught in school, I suspect this is largely bogus and/or irrelevant.
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