After reading Erard’s article again, I found that I was a lot less critical of it, and in more ways then one. The first time through, I had a hard time finding the point he was trying to make because of all the information being presented. It felt like his argument was jumping around and I was having a hard time catching up. However, I feel like I have a much better understanding and have less judgement towards his article.
A very interesting point that I found once I read through again was his statement “The challenge for the designer is to generate lots of pseudo-mistakes, some of which can be used for thinking and have the power to stick around.” This got me thinking about the metaphors we use and hear everyday. Like James Geary said, we use metaphors in our daily speech, but none of them stick around for long. We may use one to explain something to someone, but how long does it stay with us? However, there are many repeated metaphors we use just as often; even ones we may not even know the meaning to. But we still use them just because of how long they’ve been around. Things like “it’s raining cats and dogs.” In reality, it doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t help explain the weather, and is basically useless and, yet, it has stuck around and, therefore, we still use it. Erard also makes a good point about this, saying “… to what degree is the aptness that you perceive in the metaphor just a measure of how long it’s been around?”
In terms of glossing, I think it is a useful tool, but maybe not for this article itself. It did help me in one instance, however there weren’t many parts that I needed to use it with. I think this may be because of the fact that I reread and annotated twice, making it easier to understand.
