A place that sparked interest for me in Erard’s essay was the concept of “pseudo-mistakes”. When reading the first time through I did not know what this term meant, so I circled every instanced it was said to research later and try to make the connection of the definition with the text. Upon a simple Google search, I found that “pseudo-mistakes” is not a term popularly used, but just the coined “pseudo” was. It means “not genuine,” which leads to the interesting point of why metaphor designers deliberately create non-genuine mistakes. Erard answers my question pretty clearly in his essay, but I still made notes in the margins around this topic as it is a bizarre but effective method to understanding.

Going off of that, another place in the text that I marked up quite a lot in the margins was how metaphors can be used to sway the way we think and/or understand things. The example Erard gave was “life is a journey” and how, using the all-inspiring Metaphors We Live By, you can’t help but agree. Metaphor designers use psycholinguistic research to analyze how people encounter and react to new metaphors and how to craft them so people respond better. Metaphors were never something I thought too much about impact wise, so initially I didn’t think that others though too much about them either. Although, up until now I also didn’t think that being a metaphor designer was an actual job. it was really interesting to see how metaphor designers work, what they’re inspired by, the process of coming up with new and effective metaphors, and how they get people to listen to them.