September 8, 2019
Listening to James Geary’s TED talk about metaphor compared to reading the transcript of his talk, I noticed and thought about many different things than the first time around. I noticed that I missed about two whole paragraphs worth of speaking when I listened to the talk versus reading it. One thing I missed was how agent metaphors used to describe things like the stock market or the housing market, were given human like qualities.
However, what really stood out to me was not the human like qualities of metaphor, but how metaphors cause us to think and to let our curiosity run free. In the last section of his talk, Geary says how the mind is at its best when it’s all shaken up like a snow globe, and that it become shaken up due to metaphor. In all honesty, I find this to be a beautiful and agreeable statement.
Thinking that the mind is its best when in motion due to the description of something using the context and description for a different thing, is fascinating.
In fact, metaphors themselves are beautiful just as they are. Using words to fit, say the idea of the sea, to describe an essay or a person’s hair, is just amazing. Using metaphors is easily a way to enhance your thought process and your writing. Metaphors are just, an easy way to call a person interesting, beautiful, creative, amazing, intelligent, so many different things without having to say the actual words to their face. As a hopeless romantic, I think that metaphors may be the way to my heart. Describing the one you love “like the sun” or their personality as “the color of a rose” is just, wow.
