If I am ever asked a question that begins "Are you sure that..." I always want to answer "I'm not even sure of my own name or place of birth, so I'm fairly unsure about the answer to that." The problem is that I take things literally. When I was in Standard 1 (about 8 or 9 years of age) the kids in the class that I was in was told to read a story and re-tell it in their own words. I asked what this term meant, and I was told that I must not use the words that had been used by the original author.
Everyone else (as far as I was aware) found no problem doing this, but I was very distressed. It must have been a fairly strong feeling as I can remember it clearly now, four decades later. The problem I had was that I just just couldn't think how I could find synonyms for the prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, articles and auxiliary verbs that permeate English text.
In this sort of situation, in which I find myself fairly regularly, still, people will just tell me "oh, it doesn't mean avoid the use of literally every word that appears in the original story", as if there is some kind of meta information, available to everyone but me, specifying the set of words that may be re-used while complying with the original instruction. I suppose there is some kind of reasonableness test that is implicitly applied to relax the strict meaning of the original instruction.
Well, by now you are either wholeheartedly sympathising with me because you recognise exactly the problem, or simply cannot understand how there is a problem. I would guess that the latter reaction is going to be somewhat more likely. If you are in this larger group, spare a thought for those of us who find the fuzziness and imprecision of ordinary life distressing and confusing.
