“Follow the Thread”-

A few points stood out to me in Michael Erard’s “See Through Words” article. He discusses the way that metaphors are designed. I did not realize there were such methods behind designing metaphors, I just understood what they were and figured they weren’t too difficult to come up with. He mentions that metaphors are meant to help people understand the unfamiliar and I jotted down that they open people’s views on certain things or change their perception. Metaphors are really helpful for offering a new way to look at something. We know that metaphors aren’t literal, or else they would not make sense, but they are “categorization proposals”, as mentioned by Erard. They are used to make sense of other things. Another point that stood out to me was the idea of a metaphor being a room. A room without furniture would not make sense to most, but the furniture helps us see the purpose of the room and make sense of it. When developing a metaphor we often need ‘furniture’ to understand it, as in we need to make our own meaning more obvious to everyone else when designing a metaphor in order for other’s to see it as you are giving it. However, Erard states that eventually, the furniture can be removed and sometimes the best metaphor doesn’t need furniture, it does not need to be explained.