Author: kswift2 (Page 2 of 2)

You’ve been having pain in your back in the morning, so you decide to go to the doctors. They inform you that it is chronic leukemia. They support you through this hard time by telling you to fight. They tell you that this “life with chronic disease is a marathon, not a sprint, with bumps on the road and frequent detours.” (Khullar 2014) Metaphors are used in sickness and health. Whether it is to get someone through a difficult time or to allow someone to experience a deeper meaning in something. We don’t realize it, but we use metaphors in our everyday lives. You might not see it or hear it, but we encounter them at the doctor’s office, in school, at work, etc. Metaphors have an importance on our physical and mental wellbeing. It impacts our understandings and our beliefs of our bodies, our experiences, and our health. When you are reading an article, you tend to see pasts things in your first time reading, like driving to a new destination and not knowing your way around. Then your second reading, potentially allows you to see things that were missed the first time. Just like paying attention to the houses and trees the second drive, to now knowing the destination. Metaphors are there every day to help us understand a meaning of something that we might not of known or fully understood before. Metaphors can be interpreted in many ways by different people. It is our job to determine what metaphors mean to us.

Imagine a world where there was no such thing as figurative language. Do you think anything would change? Do you think there would be a new way in which we learn or look at things? I believe that there would be a change, and life as we know it would be bland and uneventful. This is because metaphors are used as another way of looking at things to understand things that you might not of before. Figurative language is a way of speaking that could potentially allow you to open your mind to something bigger and better. Living in a world where literal language was the only thing known would stomp on the only area to really reach out and have a different perspective on things.

In the article, “The Trouble with Medicine’s Metaphor”, Dhruv Khullar explains the pros and cons of using metaphors as a comfort method towards mostly patients diagnosed with leukemia or other diseases. He believes it can be taken both ways as being compared to a fighter makes you stronger. Or as being called a fighter relates too closely to a war where people usually don’t make it. I believe that this method would encourage others by relating their sickness to a fight and give them a sense of power and belief that they have control over whether they live or die. Possibly giving them a reason to say that its not over and they are not going stop trying. Although this might be false hope it is a way of comforting during the hardest times. This article emphasizes that metaphors can be used to give something a meaning that it never had before, whether it was to benefit or to not benefit. “Physicians who used more metaphors were seen as better communicators. Patients reported less trouble understanding them, and felt as though their doctor made sure they understood their conditions.” This explains how people use metaphors to describe something, in this case, big into something manageable. “Shakespeare gives the thing, Juliet, a name that belongs to something else, the sun” This is relating to the prompt because it gives a thing another meaning to influence the viewers into seeing it as something else. “As Schön related it later, someone in the group suddenly said: ‘A paintbrush is a kind of pump!” This is relating to the prompt because once again it is using, in a way, another language to describe something as something else.

In my second reading of Erards essay I had a clearer experience than my first. His whole explanation on how some metaphors need furniture made more sense to me. I realized that he was stating that when designers do these types of metaphors, they are giving a lot of room for you to figure out what he meant, and that these were the metaphors that needed furniture. When before I thought that having furniture was the easier metaphor to understand. I also was a lot more critical in my second reading. During my first read I felt forced to go along with what he was stating. The second time around I would stop and question his opinion on what he was explaining.

In the passage, when I was glossing the text, I had a hard time understand a few words such as conventional metaphors. Before, I thought these were metaphors that were “dangerous.” When I had glossed the text the second time, I later used Google to find out that it was simply a metaphor that “is commonly used in everyday language”.

I felt that glossing the text the next time I read was useful in better understanding the passage. This is because, in my first read I was paying to close attention to the text. Then the second read, only glossing, allowed me to not pay as much attention to little detail, and open my mind to understanding the complete intention of the writer.

I believe that metaphors can most definitely be designed. Especially when you are intentionally trying to create an understanding of what you are relating to.  I believe people create metaphors so people can have a deeper understanding, or another outlook on what they are focusing on. In order to accomplish this, metaphors are most of the time designed.

I agree with one of his statements explain how we accept metaphors easier when they are familiar. When you are comparing two different things it is more likely you will understand the metaphor if you know the background between the two comparisons. He uses the metaphors “love is a tree” and “a child is a machine”. We all have experienced love whether its with your relatives, friends, or relationships. We compare these feeling because we know that we need nurture and care to support a tree. Therefore, it is relatively easy to understand the similarities between these two. I personally don’t understand the similarities between a child and a machine because when I think of a child I think of a small, fragile, kid. That is not at all related to a big, hard working machine. I don’t understand the relation because I don’t understand the background that the person was suggesting. Maybe if it was a more general comparison, I as well as other people might have had a better understanding towards it.

This sort of relates to the concept of furniture in metaphors. When it says “the best metaphor needs no furniture” I agree that “love is a tree” doesn’t need as much furniture because it is pretty self-explanatory and most people will understand it immediately after seeing it.

Although I feel that this blog cite can be confusing at times, I overall think it can be an easy thing to manipulate with practice. The menus, for example, were a little hard to perfect, but with time I was able to figure it out. I believe that this blog cite will allow me to improve on many things, such as writing, reading, and my computer skills. I am excited for this journey in learning and working with something new.