The seven-year-old announces, "I want to start taking everything literally."

"Go clean your room." We've had this conversation before. He ignores me to explain himself:

No, see, there's this girl, Amelia Bedelia, and she takes everything literally. If you tell her to draw the curtains, she takes paper and pencil and makes a picture! If you tell her to dress the turkey, she puts clothes on it!"

I can understand how a child could find this rip-roaringly funny. But she isn't taking things literally. I mean, well, she is, but these expressions aren't idiomatic. The directions are simply exploiting a less common meaning of a word: "draw" - pull or move something; "dress" - clean or prepare something for cooking or eating.

I continued my point with examples:

If you're annoying me, I might say to you, "Knock it off" or "Cut it out."

Taking that literally, you might hit something or find a pair of scissors.

The three-year-old had been hanging on every word of our discussion and provided a keen conclusion when he reached around me and pulled the kid-friendly scissors from the drawer.

He said he was going to cut the curtains!