Hehe, when teaching my 8yr-old programming (in Python) I call (function call) parenthesis a hug to explain that a function "hugs" all arguments to it. She seems to get that :).

This is a fantastic analogy, thank you for sharing! I found myself really struggling to communicate how a function's arguments got passed to it to my daughter and I'm going to try this the next time I need to explain it.

I'm teaching my 12-yr old daughter Python right now, and this looks like a neat analogy -- I'll try it in a few minutes.