COMFTF-06

Composition : First Things First

The Analogy
Dr. David F. Maas

(01) The analogy is a special version of the Comparison or

Comparison/Contrast essay. The analogy is a variety of metaphor—actually
a metaphor which teaches a lesson. Dr. Maas defines a metaphor as a
comparison in which the characteristics, properties, and structure of
something we can see become projected upon something we can’t see. The
metaphor or analogy is a figurative comparison in which two things being
compared are not of the same general class.
(02) A person, for example, could be compared to a mechanical device, a
plant, or an animal. A storm is not compared to another storm, but rather a
war or a wild party. The Psalmist David compares God to a rock, a fortress,
or a shield.
(03) One way to understand the analogy is to consider that invariably two
things are being compared in structure of form and function. Two things in
some respect look alike or two things in some respect work alike. The
human being and a gorilla, or the human being and the chicken share certain
physiological similarities. The human heart and the clock share certain
mechanical similarities.
(04) I. A. Richards has suggested that every analogical expression or
metaphor has two components. The tenor—which is the content of the
message, and the vehicle—the device which conveys the content. The
relationship between tenor and vehicle can be explained by these parallels:
(05) Tenor: Vehicle
Underling message: Image or picture used to explain
Intangible: Tangible
Abstract: Concrete
Spiritual: Physical
Invisible: Visible

“He only is my rock and salvation.” (Psalm 62:2)

Tenor= permanence, strength: Vehicle= Rock
(06) One should remember that we do not use the analogy to prove
anything, but only to clarify or help the reader form a picture.
(07) Here are a few reminders for writing a sustained analogy:
 1. The student should select from a different general class a second
subject with which the reader is already familiar, having enough real
similarities to make a logical analogy or figurative comparison possible.

2. As in the comparison/ contrast essay, the student will explain one

by one the strange or complex features of the unfamiliar subject by stating or
clearly implying how they resemble the corresponding but well-known or
simple features of the familiar subject.

3. The student should arrange the points in the sequence that is best
suited to the subject matter. (Notice that in the following analogy
between the economic system and the stagecoach, the author
moves from driver to team to passengers and then back and forth
several times between passenger and team, a logical arrangement
since the driver, hunger, is permanently situated but the passengers
and the team, the rich and the poor are not.) ( From Ralph Bellamy
Looking Backward)

(08) By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of

the way people lived together in those days (in 1887), and especially of the
relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than
to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of
humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly
and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the
pace was necessarily slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at al
along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got
down, even at the steepest ascents.
(09) These seats on the top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out
of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or
critically discuss the merits of the straining team. Naturally such places
were in great demand and the competition was keen, every one seeking as
the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to
his child after him. By the rule of the coach a man could leave his seat to
whom he wished,but on the other hand, there were many accidents by which
it might at any time be wholly lost. For all that they were so easy, the seats
were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were
slipping out of them and falling to the ground, where they were instantly
compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on which they
had before ridden so pleasantly> It was naturally regarded as a terrible
misfortune to lose one’s seat, and the apprehension that this might happen
to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those
who rode.

Baseballs Versus Basketballs

(10) Dr. Donald Ward, former president of Ambassador University, often

used the analogy of the baseball as compared to as a basketball. The
baseball, which resembles the character ethic, has a firm core, a hard
rubber center, which he compared to God’s Law. Upon this foundational
core, layer upon layer of string (representing the curriculum) became
wrapped around the core in 15 week semester strips. The horsehide cover he
compares to the personality—which comes on last and is firmly stitched
to the curriculum and the essential core which represents God’s Moral and
Ethical law.
(11) The personality ethic he represents as a basketball—inflated, vain,
and ostentatious, supported by nothing but hot air. Contrasting the results of
the personality ethic with the character ethic with the character ethic,
Stephen Covey warns,” If our words and actions come from superficial
human relations techniques (the personality ethic) rather than from our core
(the character ethic) others will sense that duplicity.”

Etymology of Sincere

(12) Sometimes we use the term “sincere” as a synonym for the words
“goodness” or “genuine.” Sincere has an interesting etymology. Over the
years I have heard two stories which illustrate the term. Two Latin words:
sin, meaning ‘without’ and cerus, meaning ‘wax’ make up the composite
terms.

(13) One story illustrating the concept involves a pottery vendor who seals
up the cracks with cerus or wax to cover up the flaws. The other story
involves marble columns whose flaws became masked with resin, pitch,
or a type of wax. In both examples, the artisan intended to deceive by
concealing the cracks or fissures with cerus, wax, or paraffin. Sincere, on
the other hand, means having nothing to hide—pure from the inside out.
Insincere suggests that someone has attempted to cover up or conceal a
flaw, making something “appear quality” when it, in truth, has abundant
flaws.

How to Read a Book

 Mortimer Adler

(14) Let me use the example of baseball. Catching the ball is just as much
an activity as pitching or hitting it. The pitcher or batter is the giver here in
the sense that his activity initiates the motion of the ball. The catcher or
fielder is the receiver in the sense that his activity terminates it. Both are
equally active, though the activities are distinctly different. If anything is
passive here, it is the ball; it is pitched and caught. It is the inert thing which
is put in motion and stopped, whereas the living men are active, moving to
pitch, hit, or catch. The analogy with writing and reading is almost perfect.
The thing which is read, like the ball, is the passive object in some way
common to the two activities which begin and terminate the process.

Writing Assignment

(15) Select an analogy-symbol from the following list and fashion a

worthwhile theme that it can illustrate. Develop your essay on the same type
of outline as the comparison/contrast essay in COMFTF-05.

1. A freeway at commuting time

2. Building a road through a wilderness
3. Building a bridge across a river.
4. A merry-go-round
5. A wedding
6. A car-wash
7. Flood destruction of a levee
8. The tending of a young orchard
9. An animal stalking prey
10. A medical clinic
11. A juggling act
12. An oasis

(16) This list is only given as a suggestion of the kinds of topics that could
work as analogy essays. You may use any analogical symbol you desire.

Study Questions for COMFTF-06 (The Analogy Essay)

Dr. David F. Maas

1. How can we describe an analogy? (01)

2. Define the term Metaphor. (01)
3. What kind of items may be compared in an analogy? (02)
4. How does an analogy work? (03)
5. Identify the two components which I. A. Richards suggest compromise
every analogy. (04)
6. Define the term tenor as applied to metaphor or analogy. (04)
7. Define the term vehicle as applied to metaphor or analogy. (04)
8. Using the tenor: vehicle relationship, finding other relationships which
could be used to explain the tenor: vehicle relationship. (05)
9. Illustrate tenor: vehicle relationships in the Psalms. (05)
10. What is the purpose of a metaphor or analogy? (06)
11. Identify and describe three reminders for writing a sustained analogy.
(07)
12. Locate the tenor and vehicle in the stagecoach analogy in paragraphs 08-
09.
13. Locate the tenor and vehicle in the baseball/basketball analogy in
paragraphs 10-11.
14. Locate the tenor and vehicle in the etymology for the word sincere in
paragraphs 12-13
15. Identify the tenor and vehicle in the pitcher/catcher analogy in paragraph
14

Metaphor Analysis Worksheet

By David F. Maas

In the following passages of poetry, locate the:

Vehicle (Image)
Tenor (Underlying Message)
Grounds of Comparison

1. Psalm 1:3 - He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields

its fruit in season.

Vehicle:
Tenor:
Grounds of Comparison:
2. Psalm 1:4 – Not so are the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind
blows away.

Vehicle:
Tenor:
Grounds of Comparison:

3. Psalm 2:12-for his wrath can flare up in a moment.

Vehicle:
Tenor:
Grounds of Comparison:

4. Psalm 3:3- But you are a shield around me, o Lord;

Vehicle:
Tenor:
Grounds of Comparison:

5. Psalm 4:6- But let the light of your face shine upon us, O Lord.

Vehicle:
Tenor:
Grounds of Comparison:

6. Psalm 5:9- Their throat is an open grave; with their tongue they speak
deceit.

Vehicle:
Tenor:
Grounds of Comparison:

7. Psalm 7:2- or they will tear me like a lion and rip me to pieces with no
one to rescue me.

Vehicle:
Tenor:
Grounds of Comparison:
8. Psalm 7:15- He who digs a hole and scoops it out, falls into the pit he
has made.

Vehicle:
Tenor:
Grounds of Comparison:

9. Psalm 8:5- You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings, and
crowned him with glory and honor.

Vehicle:
Tenor:
Vehicle:

10. Psalm 9:6- You have uprooted their cities, even the memory of them
has perished.

Vehicle:
Tenor:
Grounds of Comparison:

11. Psalm 9:9- The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in
times of trouble.

Vehicle:
Tenor:
Grounds of Comparison:

12. Psalm 9:13- Have mercy and lift me up from the gates of death.

Vehicle:
Tenor:
Grounds of Comparison:

13. Psalm 9:15(a) - The nations have fallen into the pit they have dug.

Vehicle:
Tenor:
Grounds of Comparison:
14. Psalm 9:15(b)-their feet are caught in the net they have hidden.

Vehicle:
Tenor:
Grounds of Comparison:

15. Psalm 9:16- The wicked are ensnared by the work of their hands.

Vehicle:
Tenor:
Grounds of Comparison:

O Rotten Gotham-
Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink
Tom Wolfe
“O Rotten Gotham- Sliding into the Behavioral Sink,” as used here, is
excerpted from a longer selection by that title in Wolfe’s book The Pump
House Gang (1968). Here, as he frequently does, the author investigates an
important aspect of modern life, seriously, but in his characteristic and
seemingly freewheeling style. It is a style that is sometimes ridiculed by
scholars but is far more often admired. (Wolfe, as the serious student can
discover for himself, is always in complete control of his materials and
methods, using them to create certain effects, to reinforce his ideas.) In this
piece, his analogy is particularly noteworthy for the extensive usage he is
able to get from it.

1. I just spent two days with Edward T. Hall, an anthropologist,

watching thousands of my fellow New Yorkers short-circuiting themselves
into hot little twitching death balls with jolts of their adrenaline. Dr. Hall
says it is overcrowding that does it. Overcrowding gets the adrenaline going,
and the adrenaline gets them queer, autistic, sadistic, barren, batty, sloppy,
hot-in-the-pants, chance red-on-the-flankers, leering, puling, numb – the
usual in New York, in other words, and God knows what else. Dr. Hall has
the theory that overcrowding has already thrown New York into a state of
behavioral sink. Behavioral sink is a term from ethology, which is the study
of how animals relate to their environment. Among animals, the sink winds
up with a “population collapse” or massive die-off.” O rotten Gotham.

2. It got to be easy to look at New Yorkers as animals, especially looking

down from some place like a balcony at Grand Central at the rush hour
Friday afternoon. The floor was filled with the poor white humans, running
around, dodging, blinking their eyes, making a sound like a pen full of
starlings or rats or something.

3. “Listen to them skid,” say Dr. Hall.

4. He was right. The poor old etiolate animals were out there skidding on
their rubber soles. You could hear it once he pointed it out. They stop short
to keep from hitting somebody or because they are disoriented and they
suddenly stop and look around, and they skid on their rubber-soled shoes,
and a screech goes up. They pour out onto the floor down the escalators
from the Pan-Am Building, from 42nd Street, from Lexington Avenue, up out
of subways, railroad trains, up into helicopters.

5. “You can also hear the helicopters all the way down here,” says Dr.
Hall. The sound of the helicopters using the roof of the Pan Am Building
nearly fifty stories up beats right through. “If it weren’t for this ceiling,” – he
is referring to the high ceiling in grand Central-“this place would be
unbearable with this kind of crowding. And yet they’ll probably never
‘waste’ space like this.”

6. They screech! And the adrenal glands in all those poor white animals
enlarge, micrometer by micrometer, to the size of cantaloupes. Dr. Hall pulls
a Minox camera out of holster he has on his belt and starts shooting away at
the human scurry. The Sink!

7. Dr. Hall has the Minox up to his eye- he is a slender man, calm, 52
years old, young-looking, an anthropologist who has worked with Navajos,
Hopis, Spanish-Americans, Negroes, Trukese. He was the most important
anthropologist in the government during the crucial years of the foreign aid
program, the 1950’s. He directed both the Point four training program and
the Human Relations Area Files. He wrote The Silent Language and The
Hidden Dimension , two books that are picking up a kind of “underground”
following his friend Marshall Mc Luhan started picking up about five years
ago. He teaches at the Illinois Institute of technology, with his wife, Mildred,
in a high –ceilinged town house on one of the last great residential streets in
downtown Chicago, Astor Street; he has a grown son and daughter, loves
good food, good wine, the relaxed, civilized life- but comes to New York
with a Minox at his eye to record! - perfect-The Sink.

8. We really got down in there by walking down into the Lexington

Avenue line subway stop under Grand Central. We inhaled those nice big
fluffy fumes of human sweat, urine, effluvia, and sebaceous secretions. One
old female human was already stroked out on the upper level, on a stretcher,
with two policemen standing by. The other humans barely looked at her.
They rushed into line. They bellied each other, haunch to paunch, down the
stairs. Human heads shone through the gratings. The species North European
tried to create bubbles of space around themselves, about a foot and a half in
diameter-

9. “See, he’s reacting against the line,” says Dr. Hall.

10. - but the species Mediterranean presses on in. the hell with bubbles of
space. The species North European resents that, this male human being
behind him presses forward toward the booth---breathing on him, he’s
disgusted, he pulls out of the line entirely, the species Mediterranean resents
him for resenting it, and neither of them realizes what the hell they are
getting irritable about exactly. And in all of them the old adrenals grow
another micrometer.

11. Dr. Hall whips out the Minox. Too perfect! The bottom of The Sink.”

12. It is the sheer overcrowding, such as occurs in the business sections of

Manhattan five days a week and in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, southeast
Bronx every day-sheer overcrowding is converting New Yorkers into
animals in a sink pen. Dr. Hall’s argument runs as follows: all animals,
including birds, seem to have a built-in inherited requirement to have a
certain amount of territory, space, to lead their lives in. Even if they all have
the food they need, and there are no predatory animals threatening them,
they cannot tolerate crowding beyond a certain point. No more than two
hundred wild Norway rats can survive on a quarter of ground, for example,
even when they are given all the food they can eat. They just die off.

13. But why? To find out, ethologists have run experiments on all sorts of
animals, from stickleback crabs to Sika deer. In one major experiment, an
ethologist named John Calhoun put some domesticated white Norway rats in
a pen with four sections to it, connected by ramps. Calhoun knew from
previous experiments that the rats tend to split up into groups of ten to
twelve and that the pen, therefore, would hold forty to forty-eight rats
comfortably, assuming they formed four equal groups. He allowed them to
reproduce until there were eighty rats, balanced between male and female,
but did not let it get any more crowded. He kept them supplied with plenty
of food, water, and nesting materials. In other words, all their more obvious
needs were taken care of. A less obvious need- space- was not. To the
human eye, the pen did not even look especially crowded. But to the rats, it
was crowded beyond endurance.

14. The entire colony was soon plunged into a profound behavioral sink.
“The sink,” said Calhoun, “is the outcome of any behavioral process that
collects animals together in unusually great numbers, The unhealthy
connotations of the term are not accidental: a behavioral sink does act to
aggravate all forms of pathology that can be found within a group.”

15. For a start, long before the rat population reached eighty, a status
hierarchy had developed in the pen. Two dominant male rats took over the
two end sections, acquired harems of eight to ten females each, and forced
the rest of the rats into the two middle pens. All the overcrowding took place
in the middle pens. That was where the “sink” hit. The aristocrat rats at the
end grew bigger, sleeker, healthier, and more secure the whole time.

16. In the Sink, meanwhile, nest building, courting, sex behavior,

reproduction, social organization, health- all of it went to pieces. Normally,
Norway rats have a mating ritual in which the male chases the female, the
female ducks down into a burrow and sticks her head up to watch the male.
He performs a little dance outside the burrow, then she comes out, and he
mounts her, usually for a few seconds. When the Sink set in, however, no
more than three males- the dominant males in the middle section- kept up
the old customs. The rest tried everything from satyrism to homosexuality or
else gave up on sex altogether. Some of the subordinate males spent all their
time chasing females. Three or four might chase one female at the same time
and instead of stopping at the burrow entrance for the ritual, they would
charge right in. Once mounted, they would hold on for minutes instead of
the usual seconds.
17. Homosexuality rose sharply. So did bisexuality. Some males would
mount anything- males, females, babies, senescent rats, anything. Some
other males dropped sexual activity altogether, wouldn’t fight and, in fact,
would hardly move except when the other rats slept. Occasionally a female
from the aristocrat rats’ harems would come over the ramps and into the
middle sections to sample life in The Sink. When she had had enough, she
would run back up the ramp. Sink males would give chases up to the top of
the ramp, which is to say, the very edge of the aristocratic preserve. But one
glance from one of the king rats would stop them cold and they would return
to The Sink.

18. The slumming females from the harems had their adventures and then
returned to a placid, healthy life. The females in The Sink, however, were
ravaged, physically and psychologically. Pregnant rats had trouble
continuing pregnancy. The rate of miscarriages increased significantly, and
females started dying from tumors and other disorders of the mammary
glands, sex organs, uterus, ovaries, and Fallopian tubes. Typically, their
kidneys, livers, and adrenals were also enlarged or diseased or showed other
signs associated with stress.

19. Child-rearing became totally disorganized. The females lost the

interest or the stamina to build nests and did not keep them up if they did
build them. In the general filth and confusion, they would not put themselves
out to save offspring they were momentarily separated from. Frantic, even
sadistic competition among the males was going on all around them and
rendering their lives chaotic. The males began unprovoked and senseless
assaults upon one another, often in the form of tail-biting. Ordinarily, rats
will suppress this kind of behavior when it crops up. In The Sink, male rats
gave up all policing and just looked out for themselves. The “pecking order
“ among males in The Sink was never stable. Normally, male rats set up a
three-class structure. Under the pressure of overcrowding, however, they
broke up into all sorts of unstable subclasses, cliques, packs- and constantly
pushed, probed, explored, tested one another’s power. Anyone was fair
game, except for the aristocrats in the end pens.

20. Calhoun kept the population down to eighty, so that the next stage,
“population collapse” or “massive die-off” did not occur. But the autopsies
showed that the pattern- as in the diseases among the female rats- was
already there.
21. The classic study of die-off was John J. Christian’s study of Sika deer
on James Island in the Chesapeake Bay, wet of Cambridge Maryland. Four
or five of the deer had been released on the island which was 280 acres and
uninhabited, in 1916. By 1955 they had bred freely into a herd of 280to 300.
The population density was only about one deer per acre at this point, but
Christian knew that this was already too high for the Sikas’ inborn space
requirements, and something would give before long. For two years the
number of deer remained 280 to 300. But suddenly, in 1958, over half the
deer died: 161 carcasses were recovered. In 1959 more deer died and the
population steadied about 80.

22. In two years, two thirds of the herd had died. Why? It was not
starvation. In fact, all the deer collected were in excellent condition, with
well-developed muscles, shining coats, and fat deposits between the
muscles. In practically all the deer, however, the adrenal glands had enlarged
by 50 percent. Christian concluded that the die-off was due to “shock
following severe metabolic disturbance, probably as a result of prolonged
adrenocortical hyperactivity…There was no evidence of infection,
starvation, or other obvious cause to explain the mass mortality.” In other
words, the constant stress of overpopulation, plus the normal stress of the
cold of the winter, had kept the adrenaline flowing so constantly in the deer
that their systems were depleted of blood sugar and they died of shock.

23. Well, the white humans are still skidding and darting across the floor
at Grand Central. Dr. Hall listens a moment to the skidding and the darting
noises, and then says, “You know, I’ve been on commuter trains here after
everyone has been through one of these rushes, and I’ll tell you, there is
enough acid flowing in the stomachs in each car to dissolve the rails
underneath.”

24. Just a little invisible acid bath for the linings to round off the day. The
ulcers the acids cause, of course, are the one disease people have already
been taught to associate with the stress of city life. But overcrowding, as Dr.
Hall sees it, raises a lot more hell with the body than just ulcers. In everyday
life in New York- just the usual, getting to work, working in massively
congested areas like 42nd Street between Fifth Avenue and Lexington,
especially now in that Pan Am Building is set there, working in cubicles
such as those in the editorial offices of Time-Life, Inc., which Dr. Hall cites
as typical of New York’s poor construction crews all over Manhattan drive
everybody up the Masonite all with air-pressure generators with noises up to
the boil-a-brain decibel level, then rushing to get home, piling into subways
and trains, fighting for time and space, the usual day in New York- the
whole now-normal thing keep shooting daddy human animal stroked out at
the breakfast table with his head apoplexed like a cauliflower out of his
$6.95 semi-spread Pima-cotton shirt, and nosed over a plate of No-Kloresto
egg substitute, signing off with the black thrombosis, cancer, kidney, liver,
or stomach failure, and the adrenals ooze to a halt, the size of eggplants in
July.

25. One of the people whose work Dr. Hall is interested in on this score is
Rene Dubos at the Rockefeller Institute. Dubos’ work indicates that specific
organisms, such as the tuberculosis bacillus or a pneumonia virus, can
seldom be considered “The cause” of a disease. The germ or virus,
apparently, has to work in combination with other things that have already
broken the body down in some way- such as the old adrenal hyperactivity.
Dr. Hall would like to see some autopsy studies made to record the size of
adrenal glands in New York, especially of people crowded into slums and
people who go through the full rush-hour-rush-cycle every day. He is afraid
that until there is some clinical, statistical data on how overcrowding
actually ravages the human body, no one will be willing to do anything
about it. Even in so obvious a thing as air pollution, the pattern is familiar.
Until people can actually see the smoke or smel the sulfur or feel the sting in
their eyes, politicians will not get excited about it, even though it is well
known that many of the lethal substances polluting the air are invisible and
odorless. For one thing, most politicians are like the aristocrat rats. They are
insulated from The Sink by practically sultanic buffers- limousines,
chauffers, secretaries, aides-de-camp, doormen, shuttered houses, high-floor
apartments. They almost never ride subways, fight rush hours, much less
live in the slums or work in the Pan Am Building.