No, there is no need to be legalistic, it is just what the word means. You seem to reject some correct meanings and usages of the word. I used the word "literal" to mean "actual". Any linguist will tell you that is perfectly correct. I just believe the Bible contains the actual words of God, not filtered through fallible men. How else could the Bible have any credibility? Jesus is clear that some of God's actual words were meant to be interpreted, such as parables.
Huh? Inasmuch as God was witnessed on earth by the Apostles who quote Him verbatim (assuming the Gospels are not copies of each other -- and that is not far fetched), all the Scripture is either a record of how an individual author "heard" God or how an Apostle remembers hearing Jesus Christ's words.
You are once again in denial that the Five Books of Moses go back only 500 years BC (Babylonian captivity), and that the biblical tradition of the Hebrews was passed on by word of mouth for a couple of thousand years at least, or at least one thousand years -- depending whose history you believe.
It takes more than faith to convince oneself that what was passed on by word of mouth remained "unfiltered" and unaltered by fallible men in at least one thousand years. The fact that the Old Testament itself, the three versions of it (Septuagint, Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic text) all differ from each other in length and content, throws serious doubt in the validity of your statement.
The various variations and errors of translations and human choreography of the Christian Scripture has been shown to have corrupted even the words of Christ (assuming they are verbatim and that He said them exactly as such) by translations that carry erroneous tense, and meaning.
The Scripture in its totality carries a message that is infallible and that withstands every scrutiny. The more one scrutinizes the message of the Bible as a whole, the more one realizes that none of its apparent contradicitons are contradictions.