Up in Annie’s room, behind the clock
"Don't point," my father warned. "You'll make holes in the air". As a kid I heard my parents share sayings like that almost daily. The admonition against pointing was really just a way of telling me that pointing could be rude in some situations, and the warning of holes in the air was just a bit of friendly verbal embroidery to make the advice more playful than didactic. Not many of these parental sayings had that kind of point, however. Many were little more than fob-offs. For example, when asked where some item was, my mother…