This paper presents a recovery of the concept of literal meaning (LM) saving the speaker’s intuition displaying that this concept can have heuristic vigor but only in those particular language games in which it is required to recover the meaning of words regarded in isolation. In other words, the paper claims that the LM of a linguistic expression can be regarded as a metalinguistic resource available to the speaker making use of it in diverse cases, for example when the conversational exchange that features communication breaks down.