Blog Post 5

Growing up in a small town of Alfred, Maine, my parents would always say, “The world is your oyster”, and I had always taken that with a grain of salt. As a child, I was always very confused because the world was not literally an oyster. Soon after, I realized the significance and the meaning behind this statement, and what a metaphor is. I slowly began to learn that metaphors are everywhere and affect my daily life. They are applied in movies, songs, advertisements, and even in doctors offices. Personally, I have never been a big believer in the power of a metaphor, solely based on the lack of exposure that I had to them, or so I thought. In the past month alone, I have been enlightened on the intelligence behind a metaphor. I truly had no idea how versatile they can be, and how much power they hold. A pondering thought that I’ve had lurking in my mind is where do metaphors come from? While reading Michael Erard’s “See Through Words”, we learned what a metaphor was in the perspective of a metaphor designer. He informs us of his prior knowledge to metaphors and their beauty. Erard states that beautiful, amazing metaphors are formed from ‘pseudo-mistakes’, and these allow people to see through the other side of the window. This definition opened up my mind and made me realize that this figure of speech can potentially make a huge impact on society, and that is what James Geary’s take on metaphors was all about. In Geary’s TED Talk, we learn how metaphors can open up the brain to discovery and creativity. Both Geary and Erard have played a significant role in changing my views about the value of a word. As humans, we are very vulnerable to each other, and what we say can have an enormous effect on one another. Metaphors allow us to enhance the importance of our word choice. Imagine you are in a doctors office and you just got diagnosed with a disease. The doctor tells you medical metaphors that condense the medical jargon that they normally use, and they form into easy to understand words. I do not think that medical metaphors are meant to be harmful in any way, but it depends on who the person is. Physician Dhruv Khullar writes about his experiences with medical metaphors in “The Trouble With Medicine’s Metaphors.” He analyzes the positives and negatives but also remains neutral in the debate. It is very important for patients to understand their conditions and what their body is going through, and metaphors allow patients to see that. When you tell a patient that they have cancer, they are going to remember every single word you said, because, at that moment, their whole life changed. You could say, “cancer is like a war” or “cancer is like a virus” and the patient is going to have two completely different thoughts on what cancer is like. Medical metaphors do need to be thoughtfully put together so the patient does not get scared, offended, or depressed because metaphors DO have the power to change one’s mind. Although metaphors can seem a little obscure, they have the power to change people’s functioning minds, open the mind up to discovery, and allow people to have a better understanding of a situation.