Blog 3

After reading and annotating this article the first time around, I was under the impression that I understood the reading well and felt no need to revisit it for further analysis. However, once I began reading it for a second time I realized that there were a few things that I hadn’t noticed before. For instance on page three, Erard states “Another way to create the mistake is to break the thing you want to explain into its components, then connect them to some other ideas or domain of life.” I think I overlooked this passage the first time around because in my head I thought “yeah, sure! That’s the definition of metaphor” without thinking. But in revisiting the same passage this second time, my brain processed it in a different way. This time around I thought “Wow! I couldn’t describe a metaphor any better.” To elaborate, sometimes I find that my mouth has a difficult time putting my thoughts into words, even if what I am attempting to describe is something that I understand perfectly well. In this case, it took seeing a perfectly articulated definition of a metaphor for my brain to recognize that I personally would have struggled to describe despite the fact that I do understand the meaning myself. Additionally, I managed to stumble across two words that I seemingly skimmed over on my first time reading, despite not being confident in their meaning. The first word being “Provocations,” used in the following sentence on page 3: “It was the Princeton psychologist Sam Glucksberg who in 2003 argued that metaphors are really categorization proposals. Provocations, you may call them.” In doing some research of my own, I was able to find that Provocation is commonly defined as as “the act of provoking” Or “Irritating.” However I found that it could also be defined as “stimulating” which, when plugged into Erards sentence on page three, makes it a lot easier to understand. Furthermore, there was one other word that I found myself scratching my head over, with little-to-no idea of what in the world Erard could be meaning by it. The word is “bottleneck.” I stumbled upon this word on page four where Erard quotes psychologists Gentner and Bowdle who refer to English as a bottleneck for those who speak the language. Upon doing some research on my own, I discovered that the term “bottleneck” in this context is being used to articulate that the barriers of being an only English speaking individual can be a bit of s road block.