Is this an example of literal thinking?

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EXCELLENT explanation / post, TTRSage!!

Skilpadde: Yeah, "almost accident" totally makes more sense!! We actually used to have a saying similar to that, here; but, someone said something like: "he ALMOST missed", and it morphed into "near miss". In this day-and-age when ADHD is running rampant, I feel some people are only HALF-hearing, and / or, HALF understanding things that are being said----these forums, ALONE, are near-proof of that----but, at least, on forums, people can go back and re-read, but they don't!!

When I graduated with my MS in Math and moved out of my office shared with three other grad students in the Math Department, they put another student in my place. I had had a refrigerator in there and wouldn't need it again so I gave it to a friend of mine who was still there. He didn't actually spend that much time in that office but would go in about once a week.

The student who took my place was a very nice and competent math grad student. One day the friend of mine opened the refrigerator door and it really stunk. There was a package there so he asked the new grad student what it was who replied that it was fish. (I'm not sure what he was doing with raw fish in an office where he wouldn't be able to cook it.) The friend of mine asked him if he would mind not leaving it there in the refrigerator and the new student agreed to take it out.

A week later, he came in again and the entire office stunk really bad. It turned out that the new grad student had merely taken the fish out of the refrigerator and placed it on a bookshelf where it had been stinking up the office for the entire week.

No, you're not rambling. That's an excellent summary of much of my own experience interacting socially with the world. Very well-stated!

You kinda beat me to the punch line.

I've NEVER heard salmon referred to as "flying fish". But his mom might be right-that locals in the Pacific Northwest along the Columbia River- observe salmon swimming upstream from the sea -to their fresh water breeding grounds in the mountain streams- and they observe the salmon leaping up waterfalls, and other athletic feats. So I can imagine that locals might call them "flying fish".

But the term "flying fish" usually refers to that family of ocean dwelling vaguely sardine like fish with overgrown winglike fins- that leap from the wave crests and glide through the air over long distances over the sea surface (kinda like flying squirrels glide between tree branches). Totally unrelated to salmon. The guys on the Kon Tiki raft (the famous balsa wood raft built by the explorer Thor Heiderthal (sp?) to test theories about ancient migration from south america to the south seas by drifting thousands of mile across the Pacific) were able to get protein in their diet from the flying fish that would slam into the raft's sails and fall onto the raft.