I have been teaching my grandson the difference between figurative and literal. I think he gets it; in the book we were reading, “her face fell” and “her eyes popped out.” “Figurative,” he said.

My greatest teaching aid has been the Adventures of the Gummi Bears. Apparently there was a poster in the writers’ room that said “When in doubt, make it literal.”

“He’s all washed up,” a character would say as the villain was swept away by a flood.

The rest of the examples escape me (I should have written them down), but if there was an angry chicken caught in a pool of water, next to a sputtering boss, the dumb characters would say, “The boss is madder than a wet hen.”