Blog 2

Reading this article on metaphors ripped up all the different parts of how a metaphor is made and what goes into a metaphor. Michael Erard, the author of “Seeing Through Words”, explains how each metaphor is made and the process it goes through. He talks about his own personal experience but also others that he’s known of. One part of this article that actually had me interested and that I could relate to was when he was talking about Brian Bowdle and the ‘career of metaphor’ hypothesis. The theory basically talks about how people understand metaphors more if they are put into more of a basic form first. In school I learned metaphors to be sentences using like or as. For example ‘she ran LIKE a cheetah’ or ‘Life is LIKE a rollercoaster’. Those were the ones I recognized as metaphors as I grew up. But it eventually just transformed into me understanding a metaphor without like or as in them. ‘Life is a rollercoaster’ or ‘The brain is a machine’. I didn’t even realize my transition into how I was able to pick that up until I read this article and how that was purposely put into my brain. That section of the article literally took me back into the 6th grade when I was learning sentence terms and what kinds of sentences you can build. The section was nostalgic for me and I just loved it.

Erard also explains some of the process of what it is to come up with a metaphor. He uses the word “pseudo-mistake’ a lot through his writing. I looked up the definition of pseudo and the one word I could find that resonates with it is false. So Erard talks about false mistakes. But I find that interesting. I find it interesting because these metaphors are being made through mistakes. Before looking up pseudo I thought that it was just a fancy word put in front of the word mistake. So I thought all metaphors were made from mistakes and I kind of liked that. Since evryone makes mistakes it intrigued me. But after the research learning they’re false mistakes, wrong mistakes, incorrect mistakes, I will say I am a bit confused. I’m assuming these are false mistakes because they’ve been tampered with so it’s not a fully true mistake that just happened. But I honestly don’t know now. But I’m glad I looked it up, it adds more thinking into my initial thought. So I must figure out what he means.

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