True enough!
This brings to mind yet another of my favorite examples from linguistics where people can easily get confused about words and their meanings. The Russian language, as spoken by the most Russians—including the last President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev—is filled with idioms, many of them reflective of many centuries of Russian Orthodox Church culture and phrases. President Reagan tended to take such idioms far too literally. He assumed that Gorbachev’s frequent expressions of “God bless”, for example, revealed the personal religious thoughts of a closet Christian. Reagan’s advisers had to keep reminding him not to read anything pietistic into such idioms. However, it is not clear that Reagan ever fully grasped what he was being told about the limited “literalism” which can safely be gleaned from religious idioms in common speech.