There are people in the world who interpret words literally. They are wrong. Words are part of language and does not have absolute interpretations, but rather is about communication of concepts and ideas between humans that is derived through context and common culture and religious beliefs.
What should we do about those people? To have their views questioned, challenged, and criticized can be used to flag to the rest of society that percived social norms has been violated, and it might inform the party at fault that their literally interpretation is wrong. However some people either has personality trait or disorders that commonly get stuck on interpreting words literally, and strangely they seem to be more common in academic and religious environments.
It makes sense that for people who struggle with subtlety, the explicit world of academia and religion would be highly appealing.
It's difficult to reverse engineer the dynamics of the subtle in the language of the literal but I suspect it is not impossible. There are people with social disorders that had to learn all the social cues that we take for granted as intuition, explicitly but many end up having better social skills than the average. Why? Because by being forced to learn these skills in an explicit way, they have to come to a higher level understanding than that of the average sociable person.
The same is true for the artist with aphantasia or the mathematician without the ability to do mental arithmetic. In many cases, the same systematic study that people with these unique deficiencies have to undergo to learn those skills must be done by even average people to acquire real proficiency in that area, except average people have less of a blank canvas to work with which is both an advantage (there is already a bit of mileage in terms of practice) and a disadvantage (suddenly, you have to unlearn biases and bad habits that you have been unknowingly reinforcing).
This was a bit of a rant and a half but I just wanted to put down the train of thought your comment put me under.
What should we do about those people? To have their views questioned, challenged, and criticized can be used to flag to the rest of society that percived social norms has been violated, and it might inform the party at fault that their literally interpretation is wrong. However some people either has personality trait or disorders that commonly get stuck on interpreting words literally, and strangely they seem to be more common in academic and religious environments.