While comparing my first read through of Michael Erard’s “See Through Words”, I was able to catch a few things that I didn’t the first time. Things that caught my attention this time were simply how he defended designing metaphors. I used the audio this time and the expression from the reader allowed me to interpret Erard’s ideas differently. Something I caught was how much Erard believes in pseudo-mistakes. I agree that to discover something you do need to make mistakes, however I don’t think they should be called pseudo-mistakes when you have to make them to learn, there’s no faking anything you learned so why fake your mistake?

There were some vocabulary I wasn’t familiar with, such as epigenetic so I looked it up and found this as its meaning: of a deposit or structure : formed after the laying down of the enclosing rock. In all honesty, it mostly just sounds as though Erard chose that word specifically because not everyone knows the meaning. With choosing a word not many people are familiar with, it wouldn’t make sense to come up with a metaphor using it because it wouldn’t be understood. 

A particular metaphor I was unfamiliar with was between dandelions and orchids. With a bit of research I realized the idea of this metaphor I had originally is actually the opposite of the meaning. It seems that “dandelion children” are actually seen as more resilient than “orchid children” as they are considered to be more sensitive. My original understanding of this metaphor was that people thought higher of the orchids and ignored dandelions.

By looking up the information I wasn’t sure about, it allowed me to have a clearer understanding of Erard’s work in that he wants people to only create metaphors surrounding things everyone will understand and relate to.