“Metaphors We Live By,” by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson Summary: Metaphors are pervasive in everyday life, or so we think. Metaphors influence how we perceive things we see, read, and hear. The examples of “argument is war” and “time is money” are staples of American culture. Pop culture has normalized the connotations of metaphors thus making it easy to throw into everyday life. Metaphors can be taken literally and figuratively making them seem pervasive but in reality they are limited by context. Context includes time, setting, and audience. In certain cases, the meaning can be explicitly stated and context doesn’t matter, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Response: Word choice and context go hand-in-hand when trying to convey a message. Everyone has to be able to understand and/or not get offended for a metaphor to work. For example, when translating english to spanish you’d have to be in the know of the culture to be able to give a proper translation. A literal word-for-word translation might make zero sense.
“The Egg and the Sperm,” by Emily Martin Summary: The author wrote the article to shine a light on the gender stereotypes hidden within the scientific language of biology. No matter the role of the egg it seems like women just can’t win when it comes to biology. In one explanation menstruation can be viewed as a failure. It can be argued that menstruation makes useless products. Whereas, man is glorified for the process of spermatogenesis, the normal human male may manufacture several hundred million sperm per day.” The author makes the argument that biologists are hypocritical. She asks why the male’s vast production of sperm is not seen as wasteful. She wrote “assuming that a man “produces” 100 million sperm per day during an average reproductive life of sixty years, he would produce well over two trillion sperm in his lifetime.” In another explanation where the egg has a larger and more active role, the word choice invites another cultural stereotype where women are a dangerous and aggressive threat.
Response: Once again I have been made aware of something that was hidden in plain sight. Before reading “The Egg and the Sperm” I wasn’t really aware of the word choices used to describe the interactions between an egg and sperm. However, by incorporating gender roles in nature it makes it easier to understand or makes it relatable. Even if they are bias towards man our understanding of the interactions remains intact, slightly misguided but overall intact.
Connections: The sentence from “Metaphors We Live By” that reads “these examples show that the metaphorical concepts we have looked at provide us with a partial understanding of what communication, argument, and time are and that, in doing this, they hide other aspects of these concepts” best describes the connection between the two texts. In “The Egg and the Sperm” the argument of gender roles hidden in scientific language really only works if your culture, such as the one in the U.S., has the open-mindedness of seeing women equal to men. In other countries this still isn’t the case and women are repressed to a smaller role in society.