'parable' is correct and usable in written English.
It is a literary device used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson. For example, "The fable of the tortoise and the hare is a parable teaching us that slow and steady wins the race."
Bennett illustrated well the impact of cuts to services with a parable of a children's centre worker who once provided a service to the community, used to pay tax and had "a modest amount of income to spend", but is now struggling on Job Seekers Allowance.
Without giving away the ending, the film hints at the start of a brave new post-human era (or is it a Buddhist parable?) about the surrender of self into a larger entity.
By the 18th century, Christian butterfly collectors saw a religious parable in the insect's life cycle.
The feel of the book was the only thing I liked about The Water-Babies, which ends with a moral: And now, my dear little man, what should we learn from this parable.
Since it was published in 1943 the children's classic The Little Prince has entranced generations of readers with its parable of loneliness and loss.
"I should have judged her by her deeds not her words," he writes in the book, which is less a childlike fantasy than a parable about the obligations of conjugal love.
The yield was miserly yet there were more than four times as many bids as there were bonds for sale.This tale of two bond auctions is a parable for the contrasting fortunes of near-stagnant rich economies and fast-growing emerging markets.
The "Sneetches", a people obsessed with stars on their bellies, is a tale with a gentle, funny message about racial prejudice; "Yertle the Turtle" is a parable about megalomania and dictatorship; the Lorax has an environmental moral; Horton, a motherly (male) elephant who hatches an egg, stresses "a person's a person no matter how small".
Santander has even managed to make golf a parable of risk management.
Very much a work of art rather than of history, this beautifully written novel edges towards saying something profound about the relationships between art and life, men and women, the powerful and the disempowered, without ever becoming a simplistic parable.
Race to the Finnish South by south-east Divided and unruled A parable of two debtors ReprintsJan Urban, a doughty Czech ex-dissident turned clean-government campaigner, agrees.
