Teenie Matlock's Lecture On Metaphors

Modern society is hyper-focused on efficiency, which is especially evident in universities and colleges like UC Merced, that stress STEM majors, and in this society where some of the highest paying jobs are either in STEM or business fields. However, doing a task as quickly and cost effective as possible is not always the best course of action. On one hand, the human ability to make use decision making skills and communicate efficiently allows us to solve problems quickly, on the other hand efficiency can sacrifice the time we need to consider the consequences our actions. Subjects in Core, such as classification, water, air pollution, metaphors address what we do as people to be efficient and how goals of efficiency can have dire, unforeseen consequences that effect our health and environment.

Metaphors are used as a means of comparing one thing to another directly. Moreover, people use metaphors every single day to communicate to others quickly and efficiently. In Teenie Matlock’s lecture on metaphors we explored how metaphors are used in order to convey abstract ideas with simpler, easier words that we can see, touch, or hear. For example, the stream of consciousness is a metaphor that compares water to how psychologist believe our consciousness moves. Almost all people understand and can easily visualize a stream of water, that is flowing and continuous, then the we can use that in order to convey consciousness, which is also flowing and continuous but more abstract than a stream. This daily use of metaphor is incredibly efficient. Rather than taking the time to explain concepts, like stream of consciousness, the internet, and time every single time we need to talk about them, we can use simple, easy to understand language. This is one of the benefits towards a focus on efficiency. Considering the amount of metaphors, we use every single day, we save a large amount of