For this blog I read an essay by Michael Erard called, “See Through Words“.
One sentence that stood out to me in the essay was in the first paragraph, “But neither poets nor readers would have said the metaphors were designed.”. This line stood out to me because it made me think about the past of metaphor, and how hard it must have been to understand. Metaphor was most likely derived off of some type of imagery. And it must have been extremely difficult to grasp some of the concepts. For example, the metaphor, “Life is like a garden” must have been contested. How can life have anything to do with a garden. It is only when a society develops the means to understand such things, developing new technologies and knowledge to put toward understanding these abstract statements.
Another sentence I found particularly interesting was, “The danger is that they’ll [people] discard the enterprise before they look out the window.”. The reason this caught my eye was because we can draw many parallels to modern day life. Danger always lurks behind misinterpretation. People have always had biases that have blinded them from listening to the whole story, told from all points of view. People have lost their livelihoods because people disregard a statement before they have heard everything. Also, more in tune with modern society, accepting things as truth before every angle has been explored. This idea is exponentially more dangerous than disregarding a statement. Because, if a false statement keeps gaining steam, the right statement gets overlooked and trampled by stupidity and fallacy. Which can happen if people do not check their sources, or fact check news outlets to make sure they are reporting real news. But, sometimes blindly disregarding something without looking at all sides can have its good connotations. Say, if someone asks another to go to a frat party, the second person says no because they flat out do not want go. The second person, without weighing all the reasons to go and not to go, unintentionally avoided a party were almost ten people were arrested for underage drinking.
You did a fantastic job uploading your images. They look great. Continue to expand and develop your comments. You are on the right track!
When you note the possible difficulties in understanding metaphor “way back then…” it makes me want to ask you: where do you think metaphor comes from? Do you think it’s instinctual for humans to seek out metaphor? What do you think Geary has to say about this?
Keep up the good work!