Eh?
A literalist would insist that the US President must be a plant - for a bush is a plant.
The
function of the word “bush” as applied to him is not as the name of a plant, but as a proper name. Not everyone - in fact, no one - denoted by the name Green, is green; just as not all Carpenters work with wood: nouns & adjectives
used as proper names do not necessarily function in the manner they would if they were not used as proper names.
The difference between a literalist sense & a literal sense is that the literalist overlooks the function of the words & of the texts in which they occur. Words have different
semantic functions - what they mean in a dictionary is a poor guide to how they function in a given context. That’s why a “knuckle sandwich” is not an item of food, even though a sandwich is an item of food - “sandwich” is being used in a transferred sense. The literal meaning, the
denotation, of “sandwich” is presupposed; it is the starting point of the non-literal senses of the word: it is possible to see the transferred sense only because that sense is founded on the proper sense of the word.
Literalism is not the same thing as Fundamentalism; a great deal of argument for the geographical universality of the Flood requires a non-literal understanding of tne texts. This is because they are moderns - so they cannot, & don’t, ignore meteorology & other such things of which the ancients knew little. This is why a book such as Henry Morris’ “The Genesis Flood” is packed with arguments from science - but the authors of the Flood accounts kndew nothing of cloud cover, hydrography, geological strata or any other such things. Fundamentalism distorts the texts by being so concerned that it should not be wrong, that they often empty it of the meaning it does have.
If anything, the people who read the texts with attention to the letter the larger context, are the Biblical scholars - the Fundamentalists are concerned with the literal meaning only so far as it allows them to support the inerrancy of the Bible.
Texts have different literary functions, because they belong to different literary types: some are proverbs, some are wisdom, some are mythological, some are apocalyptic, & so on. The proper sense (I think “proper” is preferable to “literal”) is that which the texts have in their own context as texts from a particular historical & cultural setting: the literal or proper sense of the Flood texts in the OT, is that which they had in their setting from which they came.
