…Do you ever see people critiquing specific word usage in novels and wonder if they know that language can be used in fun and figurative ways? And that this is half the joy of writing?

An example off the top of my head - if I say ‘He gave a whisper of a smile’, it does not mean that the smile is literally whispering; it means that the word ‘whisper’ invokes a sense of smallness, due perhaps to subtlety or shyness, and that is something I want connected to your mental envisioning of this dude’s smile. 

Saying ‘But that makes no sense; a smile and a whisper are two different things’ misses the point e n t i r e l y