A Conversation with Erard

September 9, 2019

On the first page of Erard’s essay on metaphors, he writes that in the early stages of writing, the readers of metaphors could have said the “the imagery had origins more divine, perhaps even diabolical”. Though I didn’t write any comments about this, I thought how odd it was for people to think of describing something in a particular way as “evil” or “heavenly”. As a spiritual person who grew up in a Catholic house, thinking that certain words could have been spoken by the devil just blows my mind.

Jumping over to the third page, I wrote that it makes sense to say that interpreting new metaphors is easier when the comparison is between two things that seem to fit together because in our minds, it is a whole lot easier to compare and contrast two things that are more similar than different because we are able to see how the two things could even be compared in the first place. For example, saying that “writing an essay is a trip across the country” makes some sort of sense because we all know that making a trip across the country is long, either tiring because of walking or waking up early to catch a fourteen-hour flight, but that writing an essay for your English class or a your psych class can take long hours in the library and many more hours just thinking of what to say. Also, writing an essay is a process that takes several days of thinking, proofreading, editing, and the actual writing.