[hardwaresofton]

As a native english speaker, the earlier phrase ("tantivy is to toshi as lucene is to elastic search") is easier for me to understand. I find your phrase a bit harder to understand, but it looks like just the kind of reorganization other languages do structure wise -- I don't know how to express it in proper grammatical terms, but the way the prepositions are swapped around makes it seem like native english words but with a non-english structure.

It might have to do with the use of Analogy questions in the SAT (a standardized test all but required for high school students wanting to attend good colleges in America), though it looks like they've been removed?[0].

"_____ is to ___ as ____ is to ______" was the verbatim format of those test questions.

[0]: https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-analogies-and-comparisons-w...