I'm sorry, Jeff, I did not mean to worry you or offend you. Your postings do not cause me any problems. I was just trying (unsuccessfully) to be funny. I think I just have a strange reaction to analogies, because I once read a humorous parody of intelligence tests which presented meaningless analogies such as this:
dolphin : ashtray = starfish : (a) seaweed, (b) matchstick, (c) albatross, or (d) sentence ?Answer (d) -- because in each pair, the two words have the same number of letters.
I think of silly examples like this whenever I see analogies. Also, although the analogies you post generally do make sense, in some tests it seems that you can make a logical argument for several of the choices, so there is no "right" answer. This is true not just of analogies, but of a variety of standardized test questions. An example: a friend of mine once got a question wrong when shown a map of the United States which was missing Florida, and was asked "What's missing?" His answer was "Canada." He thought that leaving out half the continent was more significant that leaving out one small peninsula. (He was from Canada, so he reacted differently to the question thatn someone from the U.S. would have.) Another example: Koko, a gorilla that has been trained to use American Sign Language to communicate, was given a "which one does not belong" question that showed an apple, a banana, a leaf, and an ice cream cone. Since she had never seen an ice cream cone, but she did eat leaves, she chose the ice cream cone as "the one that did not belong." Of course, this was considered the "wrong" answer for the intelligence test. Thinking about these examples just makes me very suspicious of all multiple-choice type questions.
Certainly analogies, antonyms, etc. can be entertaining mental exercises as well as useful in understanding the language. Nobody here objects to them, and I apologize for my silly post. Shall we ask the modertors to delete this whole thread? ![Embarrassed [:$]](/emoticons/emotion-10.gif)