The Chapter After the First One

Ramage, Ramage, Ramage. This man will beat a dead horse until the flesh wears off and the ribcage cracks. If I were to describe a rainbow like Ramage defines a metaphor, it would go something like this:

“Some have looked at the rainbow as a colorful arch in the sky, but rarely do they realize that it is merely various fragments of light that have been broken by the moister in the atmosphere. Both ideas are descriptions of the same essential thing, but one fact remains. This fact has once been pondered by many minds that, by being intelligent, have developed something that undoes the myth of many less wise individuals which is this: there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

He also likes to draw his point out by using phrases like “A gist is not to be confused with an essence, a definition, or a summary” or any other word that is listed in the thesaurus. He does this throughout the chapter and merely elaborates on various definitions of words.

Not to beat a dead Ramage book, but this chapter felt like collection of critical analyses that he wrote in high school. I felt that his use of William Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and Sylvia Plath backed up his point, but he didn’t follow up with a definitive explanation on its relevance. I had to piece that together on my own. Instead, he smeared his examples across the page like a left-handed student trying to write an essay.

I still enjoyed reading this chapter. To stick to the prompt, he did a good job of transforming words into identity which tied into the title of the chapter. I think his point was to show how words as metaphors can create a “Cultural Readymade” or stereotype, in turn, creating identities that people within a particular culture define themselves with.