Analogies are Lost Technology

We can’t make analogies anymore. They are essentially "Lost Technology"—familiar to our ancestors but now mysterious to us.

The problem is, everyone expects them to work sideways.

Example:

Person A: “Telling me (considering my weirdly loud voice) that I need to “speak up” is like telling Michael Jordan he needs to practice his layups!”

Person B: “So you’re comparing yourself to Michael Jordan, huh?”

Try using an analogy, and some shithead will tilt it sideways and smugly declare rhetorical victory. An onlooker might vaguely frown, sensing something's off but unable to say what. That lingering doubt is all that's left.

In the 17th century, uneducated peasants eagerly digested Shakespeare’s fancy, subtle wordplay. In 2025, analogy seems like a shiny semantic monolith that mostly just spooks the apes.

---

I once noted that we also can't make reasonable generalizations if they might rub a single reader the wrong way. For example, you can't get away with this now:

Tall people tend to dislike small cars.

There is 100% certainty someone will angrily lash back:

I'm tall, and I'm perfectly fine with small cars!

Hedging terms don't help at all, e.g. "Deaf people often wear hearing aids," or "Many children enjoy spaghetti."