During my second reading of Michael Erard’s “See Through Words,” a difference I picked up on was how much metaphor designing was made for marketing or product design. right from the beginning Erard claims to “shape and test” metaphors for private clients, typically businesses. I initially thought the marketing aspect started after discussing pseudo-mistakes (which, knowing the definition of this term immensely helped in my comprehension of this concept the second time through), however it really starts in the second paragraph. After describing his job, Erard goes on to say that metaphors aren’t supposed to make you revel in their beauty, but rather make you revel in the fact that you’ve potentially been looking at an object or concept with a closed mind. Here, it can be established that one of the uses for metaphors could potentially be marketers making someone see a product differently than they have before, influencing their mind to have a greater chance of that person liking a product. It’s subtle, but something I picked up on the second time around.

Since in my last blog post I focused on some terms I needed clarification on, this time I decided to look up some of the people referenced in this essay, in specific the minds behind the theories behind metaphors, Sam Glucksberg and Dedre Gentner. Glucksberg argued that metaphors are provocations, suggesting one thing belongs with another. Here I found that Glucksberg, a Princeton University professor, believes that figurative language, like metaphors and similes, can make literal language essentially defective. Gentner’s alternate theory explains that children can understand metaphors based on shared object attributes before those based on shared relational structure. Learning more about their theories than what was in Erard’s essay helped me understand them and the essay more.