I noticed that when I read Erard’s essay for the second time, there were a few ideas that seemed to make more sense and I was able to clearly understand how these ideas connected to the essay as a whole. One of the sections, I realized was reoccurring later in the essay, was the idea that people do not understand the meaning of the metaphors and don’t know what the true meaning is until they are told or figure out the meaning themselves. In the second section, he stated, “you have to direct people’s attention. You have to give them furniture to sit on that makes your architectural choices unavoidable.” Also, the idea that people’s cultural backgrounds would also play a role in their interpretation of metaphor is very important to their understanding like in the metaphor that compared childhood resilience to flowers.
Another idea that I discovered after rereading the essay was the idea about how using metaphors for mapping involve using specific or symbolic ideas that could also think about how the metaphor could affect people’s emotions. While metaphors as a category focus more on broad ideas and relating those to something specific.
Glossing the text helped me grasp several concepts that I would have missed if I had only read the article one time. Once I glossed the text, I noticed that I was able to understand the purpose of a sentence and overall paragraphs better because I was able to understand new words that I didn’t know the meanings of before reading the passage. One of the ideas that I found in Erard’s essay was the Enron fraud scandal. Enron was an energy corporation and they were found using fraudulent accounting practices. By glossing the text, I was better able to understand Erard’s reference to it in the essay and how people already have images in their mind when one word is said.
You write: “Another idea that I discovered after rereading the essay was the idea about how using metaphors for mapping involve using specific or symbolic ideas that could also think about how the metaphor could affect people’s emotions. While metaphors as a category focus more on broad ideas and relating those to something specific.”
You articulate these complicated ideas so well!
You write: “One of the sections, I realized was reoccurring later in the essay, was the idea that people do not understand the meaning of the metaphors and don’t know what the true meaning is until they are told or figure out the meaning themselves.”
Do you think people consciously teach themselves the meaning of all metaphors?