In our session this morning on "Where the Wild Things Are", the 1963 picture book by Maurice Sendak (1928-2012), my students and I discussed the repeated description of the wild things: "they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws ." Something about that rhetorical description made me think of "The Gruffalo" (1999), written by Julia Donaldson (b. 1948) and illustrated by Axel Scheffler (b. 1957)—and when I looked up the first description of the gruffalo in the book just now, I realized why: "He has terrible tusks, and terrible claws, / And terrible teeth in his terrible jaws." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 29 April 2026)