How does a figure-of-speech fallacy confuse a literal meaning with a figurative meaning?

A figure-of-speech fallacy occurs when there is a confusion between the ordinary, literal sense of a word and its metaphorical, figurative, or technical employment. This error arises from a discrepancy between the syntactic form of a sentence and its intended semantic meaning.12

Essentially, the fallacy treats a word or phrase as if it possesses a literal, physical reality when it is actually being used in a non-literal or technical way. For example, if someone states that a person is living on the "heights of ecstasy," a listener might commit this fallacy by asking for the person's physical address, mistakenly interpreting a metaphorical expression of emotion as a literal location.1

In some contexts, this fallacy also involves mistakes concerning linguistic forms, such as incorrectly assuming that a word's meaning follows a specific pattern based on its prefix or structure—for instance, wrongly assuming "inflammable" means "not flammable" by drawing a false analogy to words like "insecure".2