After doing an additional thorough read about Erard’s metaphors, I did find an additional topic I was evidently curious about. My curiosity took me to learn more about the power of metaphors. Erard speaks of how whether or not “metaphors have any power”, which in a literal sense no. Depending on the person they could be a devastatingly great impact, or barely a pinch on their mind. A metaphor is something that has a comparison from a very specific conflict or idea, to a simple and widely better understanding metaphor. So in a sense I believed they had absolutely 0 power at first, however after a second read Erard did an experiment on the streets with new metaphors and found his results which came out to be, well not surprising but an interesting thing to analyze. Originally they would mumble but when the metaphors were introduced they gradually increased the conversation about the skills linked to the metaphor. They knew the metaphor was working because they were “walking down the street together” in addition to how the “metaphor was showing them things”. At one point the author speaks about the orchid and dandelion, essentially cultural ideas that the flowers themselves “intervened and hijacked” the metaphors “power”. Which he concluded was “no good”. However, while yes metaphors do have a form or shape of power, they aren’t weapons or tools. They’re groups of words that happen to mean more in a specific situation. However, the only way I see a metaphors “power being hijacked” is if another metaphor counters the metaphor. Fighting fire with fire. While there are plenty of debates and arguments that ensure that metaphors do, or do not have power, it is safe to conclude in the very least, that metaphors powers depend on the persons effect by these words and the instance it is used. In addition to this, another topic I found interesting was that there was actually a finite amount of metaphors to be created because of the language and cultures resources are so limited. Which is wild because most people would probably think, “we have infinite words we can make infinite songs or writings or literally anything”. Erard however thinks differently. Or if not thinks differently, knows better. However, does he only think this because it is just very difficult to create metaphors, or is there a genuine limited amount of metaphors to be created? This once again links back to the power metaphors have. Essentially it’s always going to be quality over quantity when it comes to these metaphors. Overall, reading this passage again has made me definitely notice differences between the first and second read and was worth the second look over. I would not have noticed the potential powers metaphor had if it wasn’t for this review.
Credit <— Fog Clearer
Great! A few questions: What exactly do you think makes for a good quality metaphor?
What do you think it means that the rope metaphor “showed them things” during the rope=skills experiment?
I also noted Erard’s commentary on his limited linguistic resource pool for generating metaphors. It DOES seem like he’d have a limitless amount of possibilities with which to work, doesn’t it?